Elizabeth Warren used her recent address at the National Congress of American Indians to address long-standing criticisms of her claims of Native American heritage.

“You won’t find my family members on any rolls, and I’m not enrolled in a tribe,” she said, conceding that there are no tribal records of her family belonging to the Cherokee. “And I want to make something clear. I respect that distinction. I understand that tribal membership is determined by tribes — and only by tribes. I never used my family tree to get a break or get ahead. I never used it to advance my career.”

But she also insisted that she does have part Native American lineage. “But my mother’s family was part Native American. And my daddy’s parents were bitterly opposed to their relationship,” she said. “So, in 1932, when Mother was 19 and Daddy had just turned 20, they eloped.”

She used the rest of the speech to highlight issues important to Native populations, such as economic deprivation, environmental degradation, and stopping interpersonal violence against Native peoples.

Her speech was applauded by at least two critics of Warren’s claim of Native heritage.

Rebecca Nagle is a citizen of the Cherokee Nation who works on domestic violence issues as well as other activism. Last year, she wrote an op-ed for ThinkProgress critical of the Massachusetts senator. “She is not a hero because, despite claiming to be the only Native woman in the U.S. Senate, she has done nothing to advance our rights,” she wrote.

In an interview with The Intercept, Nagle gave Warren credit for addressing issues important to Native Americans. “I would say overall I think that this speech was a step in the right direction,” she said. “And I hope that she continues to walk in that direction. I also hope that people [will] hold her accountable in that direction.”

The activist appreciated how Warren focused on the underlying issues in the community rather than simply focusing on herself. “I think her re-framing the conversation and instead of centering herself, centering Native people was a really good step in the right direction. I also think that the other thing she did that was positive was making a clear commitment to prioritize Native issues,” she said. “I think we’ll have to watch and see if she makes good on that promise. But I think that commitment is a good step in the right direction. And also clearly building relationships with Native leaders.”

Nagle would, however, encourage Warren to simply withdraw her claim of being of Native heritage. “I think that’s an area where she has more steps to take,” she said. “I think [her remarks were] a step in the right direction, and it almost seems like she is saving the hardest part for last, which was admitting that she was wrong….I actually think there’s a lot of opportunity for Warren to be a public example of that. I would totally have nothing but respect for her if she was able to publicly come out and say, ‘I was told these stories as a child, I grew up with them, I believed them most of my life, but I’ve learned more, not only about Native identity, but also my family, and have learned that they’re not based in reality. And that I can’t claim these things.’ I would have a lot of respect for her. And I have a little bit of hope that that might happen.”

Tom Bonier, meanwhile, had been quoted in a Boston Globe article, pre-dating her speech, suggesting Warren apologize for her claim. Bonier had been asked specifically to respond to Nagle’s column. Bonier is the CEO of TargetSmart, a data firm that does the bulk of its political work with the Democratic National Committee, having been paid $1.05 million just this cycle.

Xochitl Hinojosa, communications director for the DNC, distanced the organization from the comments when they first appeared. “TargetSmart does not do polling for the DNC, they do not lead strategy for the DNC, and they do not speak for the DNC,” she told The Intercept. “Elizabeth Warren has been a tireless champion in the Senate for the American people and any suggestion otherwise is ludicrous.”

Now that Warren is leaning into her heritage, Bonier applauded the approach. “I loved her speech. I loved how she addressed it all head on. I’m interested to see how leaders in various native American communities respond,” he told The Intercept. “And to be clear, when I spoke with the reporter she told me that it had been proven that Warren had no Native American heritage. So I appreciate that Warren addressed that head on as well.”

For 10 years, U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement’s investigative office has worked to keep its internal handbook out of American courts. The handbook could have been used in court to show how ICE’s push to lead on denaturalization cases stands in contrast to the language of federal law governing the process, an immigration lawyer said. “We could have used it as an exhibit in a motion to dismiss” in previous denaturalization cases, said Philip Smith, an immigration attorney from Portland, Oregon, noting the contrast.

The handbook, which was issued on January 15, 2008 and published Wednesday by the independent media outlet Unicorn Riot, makes clear that the priority for ICE’s investigative division, Homeland Security Investigations, or HSI, in denaturalization proceedings is to use the most efficient means possible to fulfill a single-minded goal: leveraging the bureaucratic process to strip citizenship from naturalized Americans.

“It’s a manual for the worst outcome” with respect to investigation targets, said Alaska immigration lawyer Margaret Stock in an interview on Tuesday. That’s not unique to ICE, Stock added — it’s how the entire U.S. justice system operates. “Their objective is to inflict the most pain as possible, as efficiently as possible,” Stock said. “They feel they’re doing their job correctly if the government wins — not if justice is done.”

The 20-page manual instructs agents on the particulars of denaturalization investigations. Documents obtained by the Freedom of Information Act-driven clearinghouse Government Attic indicate that the denaturalization investigations handbook was used through at least 2016; the handbook appears in the table of contents for HSI’s 2016 Special Agent’s Manual, sandwiched between chapters on cybercrime and fraud. “There’s no reason to believe the document is not authentic,” said Matthew Bourke, a public affairs officer with ICE. “ICE-HSI does manage a special agent handbook on denaturalization investigations.”

The denaturalization handbook shows how the federal government pursues denaturalization against naturalized citizens and has instructions on how to prosecute cases efficiently to strip citizenship as quickly as possible.

Smith, the immigration lawyer, said the language of the manual — where ICE plays a chief role in pushing denaturalization — stands in contrast to the civil statute that allows for stripping Americans’ citizenship. “It shall be the duty of the United States attorneys for the respective districts, upon affidavit showing good cause therefor, to institute proceedings in any district court of the United States in the judicial district in which the naturalized citizen may reside at the time of bringing suit,” the statute reads.

The handbook, said Smith, shows how ICE is taking the power of instituting procedures away from federal prosecutors assigned to those geographic areas. “We believe Congress meant to have the case evaluated by prosecutors in the jurisdiction, the community,” Smith said. ICE declined to respond on the purported disconnect between its manual’s emphasis on ICE-led denaturalization, and the statute’s emphasis on letting federal prosecutors take the lead.

Despite the national debates that have arisen with President Donald Trump’s approach to immigration, denaturalization receives scant attention. It’s one of the many tools available to the immigration enforcement bureaucracy, but because it strips citizenship through a slow and deliberative process — and not the surprise raids by armored law enforcement officers — denaturalization isn’t synonymous with much of the reporting around ICE’s behavior.

Denaturalization uses case law and the bureaucratic process to methodically take that citizenship away and then, when possible, deport those whose status has been reverted to that of a visa holder. As a tactic, denaturalization is often politically motivated, said Stock, and targeted toward particular nationalities. “You don’t see a lot of, say, Canadians or Brits being denaturalized,” said Stock.

Immigration attorney Lance Curtright, who practices in San Antonio, Texas, told The Intercept that denaturalization can take two forms: civil and criminal. Criminal denaturalization is usually reserved for those who committed fraud to obtain citizenship for criminal activity — crimes involving terror, drugs, and the like — and carry jail terms of up to 25 years. Civil denaturalization is based on a lower standard of proof and doesn’t result in incarceration. “They’re different methods,” said Curtright, wpuho added that he had noticed that the government pursuing more civil cases in recent months.

The handbook runs through the duties of each agent and the different types of infractions that can result in denaturalization proceedings. And it’s nowhere clearer than in the section of the manual that deals with “Case Strategy.” In this section, ICE instructs its investigative officers to push for charges that will lead to automatic denaturalization, rather than those charges which would require a separate process.

“Case agents,” the manual reads, “should encourage the U.S. Attorney’s Office prosecuting a case involving naturalization fraud or illegality to include a charge of ‘Procurement of Citizenship or Naturalization Unlawfully’ under 18 U.S.C. § 1425 because, upon conviction, the court is required to revoke the defendant’s citizenship.”

“On the other hand,” the manual goes on, “a conviction for ‘False Statements’ under 18 U.S.C. § 1001 does not require the automatic revocation of a defendant’s citizenship and will result in the U.S. Government having to engage in a separate denaturalization prosecution.”

This centralization of the denaturalization process puts the onus for instituting proceedings on HSI agents. That’s indicative of a push to take away the authority provided for under the law to U.S. attorneys working in those jurisdictions, said Smith. He said that the way things are now, cases are put together by special agents in the HSI and then given to U.S. attorneys. “We don’t think it is in keeping with the statute,” said Smith.

The strategy section continues, warning agents that settling for civil infractions carries the risk that the targets of investigations may be able to retain citizenship. If the U.S. Attorney’s Office can’t be convinced to prosecute under criminal infractions, the handbook says, a settlement should be reached, if possible, with the defendant, including civil denaturalization — though that’s not ideal: “Civil denaturalization under 8 U.S.C. § 1451(a) may not result in a deportable charge against the defendant.”

Stock explained that by combining charges, the government was setting the case up to take care of everything all at once with the end goal of deportation. It’s brutal efficiency, she told The Intercept: “They want to go for the jugular.”

Denaturalization proceedings usually target false statements made by applicants on the forms they must fill out as part of their naturalization requirements, and those false statements aren’t always material to the application’s approval. That, however, won’t stop the government from pursuing charges on the basis of those false statements.

“What the government wanted was for any lie or misrepresentation to be enough to denaturalize you,” said immigration attorney Kathrin Mautino. Mautino, who runs her own specialized law firm in San Diego, California, said, “If they could prove you lied about anything, that could be enough.”

Pursuing immigration fraud isn’t new. The use of denaturalization as a tactic, however, wasn’t given much attention before September 11, 2001. After the terror attacks, said Smith, “the government began looking at and re-evaluating any and all tactics from a national security strategy.” One component was denaturalization, a tactic that has been used aggressively over the past two decades.

That changed for naturalized citizens in criminal cases when the Supreme Court, in June 2017, ruled that a simple misstatement on naturalization paperwork was, in and of itself, not enough to strip citizenship at the criminal level. Justice Elena Kagan, writing for the majority, said that the law allows the government to strip “a person of citizenship not when she committed any illegal act during the naturalization process, but only when that act played some role in her naturalization.”

Yet the different standard of proof for civil cases had meant that ICE has merely changed its tactics, not its approach. “The standard is lower on civil cases, so there is more of an emphasis on pursuing those cases,” said Laura Rótolo, an immigration specialist with the American Civil Liberties Union of Massachusetts.

Another benefit for the government in civil denaturalization is that in criminal cases, the defendant must be provided an attorney if they cannot afford one; likewise, there is no right to a jury trial in civil cases. The HSI handbook points out that “there is no statute of limitations for bringing a civil denaturalization action.” For criminal denaturalization cases, there is a 10-year statute of limitations.

Stock told The Intercept that civil cases often end with the defendant giving in against the power of the federal government. Contesting the cases can cause a defendant to rack up tens of thousands, if not hundreds of thousands, of dollars of legal bills — forcing those without means to capitulate early in the legal process. “The rich and powerful hardly ever get denaturalized,” said Stock.

Once someone is convicted and stripped of their citizenship in civil proceedings, they revert back to their original status, usually a permanent resident. Then, depending on the circumstances, the individual is deportable. However, Texas lawyer Curtright said, “It’s not automatic.”

ICE makes clear that it hopes to keep the contents of the handbook under wraps. The opening of the booklet states clearly that if the rules of denaturalization investigations are requested in court discovery, agents should consult with internal legal counsel before revealing the inner workings of the agency to stop their exposure.

“If disclosure of this Handbook or any portion of it is demanded in any judicial or administrative proceeding,” the foreword reads, various authorities within ICE for legal and public affairs proceedings “should be consulted so that appropriate measures can be taken to invoke privileges against disclosure.”

That seems wrong to the ACLU’s Rótolo, who pointed out that the internal nature of the document doesn’t justify keeping the contents away from public view. “In general, handbooks are subject to the Freedom of Information Act,” Rótolo said. “Just because it’s internal doesn’t mean it’s not subject to the law.”

Bourke, the ICE spokesperson, told The Intercept that, generally speaking, there was nothing unusual about keeping information like that in the handbook secret. “It’s not unusual for an internal training document like this to be considered law-enforcement sensitive,” Bourke said in an email, “and therefore, not publicly available.”

The level of secrecy isn’t a surprise to Mautino, the San Diego attorney, who said that it’s typical of the federal government to hold back information from defense attorneys in all manners of immigration cases. “It’s typical of the government holding all the cards and not telling you what you’re looking at,” said Mautino. “We see this all the time.”

Mautino said that the information in the handbook could be helpful for defendants and their lawyers. Instead, most of the time immigration lawyers are flying blind in court and up against a bureaucratic institution that won’t tell them anything. “They ask questions that seem to come out of the blue; we have no idea where they come from,” said Mautino. “Our cases will be stuck and we’ll have no idea why.”

Stock believes that the information in the handbook should be public, especially the information that deals with civil denaturalization. It’s a civil procedure, she explained, and so claims for secrecy and security don’t ring as true as they might in criminal cases. And it’s the government — not some private corporation. Stock said, “They need to be open and transparent about why they’re doing things.”

With an announcement made this week, the campaign staff of Randy Bryce — a union ironworker who is challenging Wisconsin Republican Paul Ryan — became the first in the country to form a union.

The contract was organized by the Campaign Workers Guild, a group of former campaign workers from all walks of life who had for years casually discussed the idea of unionizing, but finally got together to make it happen.

Colin O’Neill, an organizer at the CWG, told The Intercept that he had discussed the idea of organizing campaign staff for years with others who regularly worked for political candidates. He cited 80-hour workweeks and other persistently difficult working conditions as the reasons why they want to organize campaign workers.

“The industry is chronically underpaid and campaign workers are pretty overworked, so it was a pretty unhealthy situation for the workers,” he said.

“It was actually really great, it was kind of liberating,” Bryce told The Intercept about what it was like to be on the other side of the table in a union drive. “I spent almost a year as a full-time staff organizer for the Ironworkers.”

When asked if we will soon see the campaign worker union movement spread to other candidates, O’Neill said they are talking to a number of campaigns who have reached out and that in at least one campaign, both the candidate and campaign staff are supportive of the staff forming a union.

Lauren Hitt, a spokesperson for Bryce and a member of the new union, said that while the new contract does offer some paid time off and holidays, the hectic pace of campaigning could still drive staffers to work in cases in which they’re needed. “If Paul Ryan decides to tweet something idiotic about $1.50 on a Saturday, we’re all working,” she said. “Our first job is to get him elected.”

Currently, the CWG is just working with campaigns for candidates for office, but it is also open to expanding its focus. “We’re really open right now — the campaigns that we have a contract with and the ones we’re negotiating with,” O’Neill told us. “We’re very much open to the idea of working with issue campaigns. Really there’s no limit in terms of whether we’re willing to work with smaller or lager campaigns as well.”

O’Neill also confirmed that the campaigns the guild is actively working on organizing are Democratic candidates, but they are also open to working with campaigns from other parties. “It’s time for candidates to really live their values and support the labor rights they fight for,” he concluded.

Nate Rifkin, who served as the union steward for Bryce’s campaign, said in a statement that Bryce is that sort of candidate. “Unions fight for worker rights and dignity. They help facilitate more equal relationships between labor and management. Every worker deserves the right to join a union, and that includes campaign staffers. The workers on our unionized campaign are proud to work for Randy Bryce, a person, and candidate, who practices what he preaches,” he said.

For his part, Bryce is willing to go even further.The lack of recourse for Capitol Hill staff who face sexual harassment or abusive bosses has increasingly become a subject of debate in Washington. When asked how he feels about congressional staff unionizing as well, he was instantly on board. “Absolutely,” he replied. “I can’t imagine that there wouldn’t be [a way to do it legally]. Question is what the actual bargaining unit would be.”

In other words, the question might be whether to organize workers in a single office, or to try to organize all congressional staff across offices who have the same duties, such as legislative correspondents, whose job is to read and reply to constituent mail.

Overall, Bryce said, the reaction he’s been getting has been overwhelmingly positive, but he has seen a comment or two — one in particular from an anti-union activist — that questioned why Bryce should be elected if he’s such a terrible boss that his staff had to unionize. As Bryce paraphrased the criticism, “You wanna get this guy elected, but you’re afraid of him and need to organize?”

The exercise, said Bryce, was useful to help rebut that negative image of organizing. “He just doesn’t get that this was a willing process,” said Bryce.

If a reader were to judge from popular media accounts, the biggest threat to university life and public discourse would be obvious: the left-wing students on campus fighting various forms of bigotry and other injustices. From liberal broadsheets to Breitbart.com, commentators have taken up a strawman debate — largely shaped by the far right — about campus free speech. Tactics like “no-platforming” and physically confronting neo-Nazis have come under the liberal microscope; the ethics questioned, the proponents decried as the real fascistic force on campus.

As Adam Johnson, a contributing analyst for Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting, told me, a November study he conducted found that the “New York Times has dedicated 21 columns and articles to the subject of conservatives’ free speech on campus, while only three covered the silencing of college liberals or leftists.”

But recently released reports from a pair of prominent nonprofit organizations tell a different story, focusing on the danger we should be addressing: the increased targeting of student spaces by neo-Nazis and white supremacists, and the violence these ideologies entail.

More than 100 people were killed or injured last year by perpetrators believed to be influenced by the racism and misogyny that defines the so-called alt-right.

The Anti-Defamation League reported that incidents of white supremacist propaganda on U.S. campuses more than tripled in 2017. Groups doubling down on campus propagandizing include explicit neo-Nazis like the Florida-based Atomwaffen Division, as well as associations like Identity Evropa, known for couching its unabashed racist message in thinly veiled panegyrics to protecting Western culture and posters bearing Michelangelo’s David.

“The ‘alt-right’ is a movement of mostly young white males,” Carla Hill, senior researcher for the Anti-Defamation League’s Center on Extremism, told me. “They realize that for any movement to truly grow, they must reach young minds, and this segment of the white supremacist movement has been focused on doing that.”

The potential gravity of this surge was then underlined by a report from the Southern Poverty Law Center, titled simply, “The Alt-Right Is Killing People.” More than 100 people were killed or injured last year by perpetrators believed to be influenced by the racism and misogyny that defines the so-called alt-right, the center found.

The reports draw no direct link between the rise in white supremacist propaganda and the spike in white supremacist murders. But together, they make clear that the threat of “alt-right” influence on young people, above all young white men, is anything but academic: Racist ideology is never free of violence, and neither is it in the case of the cosplaying, Nazi-adjacent trolls of the “alt-right.”

The Anti-Defamation League reported separately in November that white supremacists and other far-right extremists were responsible for 59 percent of all extremist-related fatalities in the U.S. in 2017, up from 20 percent in 2016. While it’s too soon for much dispositive social science on the link, it’s difficult to consider all this data outside of the Trump era in American politics.

Over a year ago, there was no shortage of coverage predicting this sort of uptick in racist violence. The possibility of it occupied the liberal commentariat as Donald Trump’s presidency loomed as an unlikely aberration. Opinion pages in late 2016 ran dozens of pieces wondering whether a Trump regime would be a truly fascist one, warning of emboldened white supremacy and neo-Nazism.

The predictions have, to an extent, come to fruition: As the Anti-Defamation League and Southern Poverty Law Center reports shows, the American far right is sucking up more and more oxygen and exacting an increasingly deadly toll on the country. Trump, for his part, has veered dangerously close to condoning the far right’s violence; at the very least, he has sought to diffuse blame for it.

Even as bigotry and racist violence have dug into their footholds over the course of the last year, many of the same liberal publications once seemingly obsessed with the threat of fascism have devoted more energy to decrying the students and staff organizing to expunge hate from their midst.

At New York Magazine, for example, centrist ideologue Jonathan Chait decried the “repressive methods and slogans” of leftists chanting, “Shut it down!” New York Times neoconservative Bari Weiss tweeted in horror that it was “amazing to watch leftists turn free speech into a right-wing issue.” In a New York Times op-ed, the president of the University of Oregon, Michael H. Schill, said the campus “crusade” against fascism was “misguided.”

After the right-wing “Unite the Right” rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, descended into violence, including the killing of a protester by a far-right rally-goer, Trump came under heavy criticism for blaming “both sides.” Yet the mainstream media has too frequently adopted an almost identical stance when it comes to the balance of coverage between left-wing and right-wing demonstrators. In the month following the rally, America’s six top broadsheet newspapers ran 28 opinion pieces condemning anti-fascist action, according to FAIR, but only 27 condemning neo-Nazis, white supremacists, and Trump’s failure to disavow them.

The Anti-Defamation League’s November report evidences the flaws in this “two sides” position. The group found the far right was responsible for 71 percent of domestic extremist killings in 2017, but only 3 percent of killings were attributed to “left-wing extremism” — and even reaching this figure meant the Anti-Defamation League lumped together “anarchists and black nationalists.”

“Alt right” and neo-Nazi organizers — where there is significant overlap — make no secret of the rhetorical Trojan horse they use to infiltrate campus discourse. When white supremacist groups like the white nationalists of the National Policy Institute, along with Identity Evropa, began targeting college campuses in the spring of 2016, they were explicit in their cooption of the liberal lexicon of “safe spaces” and free speech protections.

“Here it is, the birth of the free speech movement,” pronounced far-right group Red Ice in May 2016, at a small rally at the University of Berkeley, California. It was a potent combination: a cynical adoption of traditional liberal and leftist speech mixed with a genuine desire to be able spread ideologies of hate in public without interference. Liberal centrists swallowed it hole.

Wittingly or not, it was a devilish sleight of hand: neo-fascists relying on American liberalism’s unmatched fetishization of protected speech in order to claim that the real fascists are in fact the ones who would see them silenced.

Debates about whether to give a platform to far-right speakers, and which ones, are about ethics and tactics. These issues have been addressed at length — including by me — and we don’t need to go over it all again. Suffice to say that the anti-authoritarian antifa groups criticized for violating the First Amendment rights of white supremacists are not in the habit of asking for government or institutional suppression of anything, let alone speech.

The decision to counter hate speech with confrontational protest is not a constitutional violation, even if certain tactics cross the line into illegality. And for the most part, anti-fascist strategy is to draw large protests crowds in order shut down far-right gatherings, using numbers to reduce the likelihood of violence.

All this comes amid a very real threat to progressive students and faculty on campus — to their lives, yes, but also their livelihoods, and even, dare we say it, their ability to speak out. When faculty members have come under attack and lose positions for their support of the international boycott against Israel, when events on the issue have been canceled, and Israel lobbyists push for banning boycott activity on campus, no cottage industry of media outrage emerges to crow about pro-Palestinian groups’ free speech.

The Anti-Defamation League, for its part, is a longtime foe of the Palestinian rights movement, boycotts of Israel, and antifa actions. But even with this history, the group is issuing dire warnings about the immediate dangers of the modern far right — something much of the media has still failed to capture with the necessary gravity.

To be generous, the media focus on the free speech canard could reflect the reasonable assumption that readers already know emboldened white supremacy is bad. To be less generous — and more realistic — liberal and centrist media institutions don’t care as much about white supremacy as they claim to. White supremacy has never stood at odds with the American status quo. It’s rise on college campuses is a disgrace, but in itself is not a disruption.

]]>http://uproxx.com/news/panic-campus-leftists-far-right-surge/feed/2far-right-grid-uproxx.jpguproxxinterceptThe First Amendment Transcends The Law And Gives Us Strength In Dark Timeshttp://uproxx.com/news/first-amendment-transcends-law/
http://uproxx.com/news/first-amendment-transcends-law/#commentsThu, 08 Feb 2018 16:05:11 +0000http://uproxx.com/?p=401085898

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On December 13, I entered the Cook County Courthouse in Chicago prepared to be taken into custody and jailed for contempt. At issue was a subpoena demanding I answer questions about the whistleblower whose tip prompted me to investigate the fatal 2014 police shooting of 17-year-old Laquan McDonald.

Were it not for that individual, who had disclosed the existence of dashcam video of the incident and provided a lead that enabled me to locate a civilian witness, we would not know the name Laquan McDonald. Once I had secured the autopsy report that revealed the boy had been shot 16 times, I published an article in Slate challenging the police account of the shooting. Months later, when the video was finally released, a cascade of events ensued: The superintendent of police was fired, as was the head of the agency that investigates police shootings; the state’s attorney was voted out of office; the United States Department of Justice initiated an investigation of the Chicago Police Department; and the officer who shot McDonald, Jason Van Dyke, was charged with first-degree murder.

It was in the context of the murder case that I was subpoenaed. The judge, Vincent Gaughan, permitted Van Dyke’s lawyers to seek to compel me to testify on the basis of their claim, for which they offered no evidence, that the source had given me documents protected under the Garrity rule, which protects public employees from being compelled to incriminate themselves during internal investigations conducted by their employers.

From the outset, I made it clear that I had received no Garrity-protected documents and that I would refuse to answer any questions that might reveal the identity of the source. There was nothing heroic about this stance. It was not a choice. I was simply doing my job as a reporter.

The litigation was complicated by a gag order — more delicately referred to as “decorum order” — that Gaughan had imposed at the outset of the Van Dyke proceedings. As a result, some of the pleadings in this legal controversy over freedom of the press were sealed.

It was only during a hearing in open court on December 6 that the press and public became aware of the “fake news” thesis Dan Herbert, Van Dyke’s lead attorney, was advancing. He claimed I was not a reporter, but an activist — hence unprotected by reporter’s privilege — and had been engaged from the start in an anti-police campaign that did grievous harm to his client’s constitutional right to a fair trial. In the course of that campaign, he alleged, I had colluded with FBI agents who allowed me to sit in on interviews with two civilian witnesses to the shooting, and I had also conspired with the lawyers for McDonald’s family. Central to Herbert’s argument — if something so hallucinatory can be said to have a center — was the claim that I had drawn on knowledge gained from Garrity–protected statements to shape the accounts of civilian witnesses in a coordinated strategy designed to convict Van Dyke.

Herbert’s thesis about my reporting may prove to have been a dress rehearsal for the trial. It reflects the general stance of the Fraternal Order of Police (which is widely believed to be paying for Van Dyke’s defense) with respect to any and all allegations of police misconduct. The FOP asserts in the strongest possible terms that the police are victims of a conspiracy in which the civil rights bar is aided and abetted by the media. In any particular case of alleged abuse, the accused officer is thus the real victim.

Herbert closed his argument by invoking Brown v. Mississippi, a 1936 case in which the Supreme Court set aside the convictions of three black sharecroppers for the murder of a white farmer on the grounds that their confessions had been coerced by police torture. The three men had been repeatedly and mercilessly whipped; and one had been hung from a tree limb in a mock lynching that left rope scars on his neck. Van Dyke, Herbert argued, had suffered comparable harms from my reporting. “It’s the same thing legally,” he said, “as those sharecroppers that were tortured.”

It was a stunning moment. The Laquan McDonald case invites comparison to the lynching of Emmett Till, another child of Chicago, in Mississippi in 1955. The dashcam video can be seen as the counterpart to the fateful decision of Till’s mother to have an open casket at her son’s funeral: a window through which a mutilated black body illuminates the violence that enforces structures of exclusion and inequality. Whatever the outcome of the murder trial, that is the light in which many Chicagoans are struggling to come to terms with the incident. So it was startling, even in the adversarial setting of the courtroom, to hear the assertion that it is Van Dyke who is in danger of being lynched.

On December 13, my lawyers and I came to court prepared for several alternative scenarios. The issues had been fully briefed. Our first line of argument was that the subpoena failed to satisfy minimal criteria of relevance. Beyond that, we made clear that I would invoke reporter’s privilege. That is where things promised to get complicated, for the judge appeared to favor a narrow reading of the term “source” that would allow other lines of questioning so long as I was not explicitly asked the name of the source — questions I would refuse to answer.

In the end, the hearing proved anticlimactic. Gaughan distributed a written order quashing the subpoena. He did not reach the issue of reporter’s privilege. “To uphold the subpoena of Jamie Kalven,” he wrote, “would be nothing more than a fishing expedition in search of information that the timeline of events, discovery documents, and testimony suggest simply does not exist.”

The ruling has been hailed as a victory for freedom of the press. Needless to say, it was a relief for me. Yet the episode warrants a closer look for lessons it might yield.

Gaughan’s well-reasoned ruling came only after two months of litigation that significantly disrupted my life and required substantial investment of legal resources. Imagine how harrowing such a situation could be for a reporter who was not as well-positioned as I was. Or for a publication struggling, as so many are, to survive economically. Imagine living in a society in which attorneys could routinely haul reporters into court and inflict comparable costs on them and their publications with no more showing of relevance than was made in this case.

It would thus be a mistake to see the quashing of the subpoena as a legal victory for freedom of the press. Yet it was a victory of another sort. The support I received was extraordinary. My attorney Matt Topic and his colleagues at Loevy & Loevy provided superb pro bono legal representation. The Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press filed an amicus brief and recruited 18 major media organizations to join it. The judges of the Hillman Prize issued a statement of support that was signed by hundreds. And I received words of encouragement and offers of assistance from numerous individuals and organizations.

Although the controversy over the Van Dyke subpoena could easily have arisen at another time, it somehow belongs to this historical moment of “fake news” discourse and accelerating devolution of the federal judiciary. My refusal to comply with the subpoena, it appears, provided a vehicle for others to express their anxieties about and commitment to the First Amendment.

The experience has left me brooding about the power of civil society to sustain First Amendment freedoms in challenging times. In this country, we tend to take a legalistic view of those freedoms: to see them as being defined by legislatures and courts. That orientation is at once a strength and a weakness. It is a strength in that First Amendment adjudication has over time yielded an extraordinarily rich body of experience, analysis, and reflection about a range of issues. It is a weakness in that we are prone to imagining we are somehow free because we “have” the First Amendment.

This line of reflection carries me back to the beginning of my career as a writer. My father, Harry Kalven Jr., was a constitutional scholar at the University of Chicago Law School. When he died in 1974, he was in the middle of an ambitious intellectual history of the First Amendment at the level of the U. S. Supreme Court. He bequeathed an unfinished first draft of some 1,200 pages, which I had spent more than a decade preparing for publication. It was ultimately published in 1988 under the title, “A Worthy Tradition: Freedom of Speech in America.”

Thirty years later, “A Worthy Tradition” is dated in some respects, not surprisingly, but it is also powerfully relevant to the current moment. A major theme of the book, reflected in its title, is that the American experience under the First Amendment has yielded something more than a body of legal precedents. It is a tradition of the society — a tradition that has power to guide us as citizens and journalists and that we in turn have power to nourish with our actions.

Viewed as a tradition, the meanings of the First Amendment in American life are thus not confined to what the Supreme Court says at any given moment. The narrative matters, as well as the precedents. At various junctures in our history, a heightened sense of the nation’s vulnerability in a dangerous world has brought on failures of nerve and attacks of constitutional amnesia. At such times, national security concerns have eclipsed our core values, yielding legislation, administrative procedures, and judicial decisions that cut deeply into constitutional freedoms. Those debacles are assets of the tradition, every bit as much as moments of judicial clarity.

Hollywood is currently celebrating one of those moments of clarity. In “The Post,” Steven Spielberg dramatizes the events leading up to the Supreme Court’s 1971 decision in the Pentagon Papers case that reaffirmed the strong presumption against prior restraint of the press under the First Amendment. That is indeed a precedent worth celebrating, but a robust sense of the tradition dictates that we also recognize that the essence of censorship in this society is not direct government suppression, but self-censorship. The reality is that individuals and news organizations routinely impose prior restraint on themselves.

Self-censorship rarely calls itself by its true name. It is readily disguised as editorial judgment or legal prudence. It is induced not only by restrictive laws but also by vague, overbroad legal formulations that leave speakers guessing about the boundaries of permissible expression and by negative examples, such as my recent skirmish over the Van Dyke subpoena. Its logic is especially compelling under conditions of economic distress, when many publications are one frivolous lawsuit away from closing down. And it often concedes more freedom than would, in the worst-case scenario, have been demanded.

Civil society solidarity animated by a confident sense of the First Amendment tradition can act as an antidote to self-censorship and a source of civic courage. The atomic particles constituting freedom (or its absence) in a society are choices made by individuals to speak or remain silent, to resist or acquiesce. Viewed in this light, there can be little doubt that the civil society response to my case improves the odds in the future that other journalists, when challenged, will find it easier to fully inhabit their job descriptions and that potential whistleblowers will be more likely to reach out to the press. Although the extent of this dynamic is impossible to gauge with any precision, it would be a mistake to discount it. If civic courage is a social value, rather than an individual endowment, then we have the capacity to generate it — to give each other heart for the intensifying struggle to preserve First Amendment freedoms that lies ahead. Speaking as a grateful beneficiary of that dynamic, I have no doubt of its reality and its power.

Iowa Republican Steve King is a notorious bigot who has comfortably served in Congress since 2003, but a surprising challenger in the historically Republican district is proving he may have what it takes to unseat King in November.

Former professional baseball player J.D. Scholten is a progressive who is one of four Democrats who have tossed their hats in the ring of Iowa’s 4th District. He witnessed a surge in fundraising at the end of last year, bringing in $174,344 to King’s $87,544 in the fourth quarter. (King has raised the most money overall, with $244,725 to Scholten’s $214,487, but last quarter’s results show the tide may be turning.)

Progressive insurgents have entered congressional races in district after district amid an expected Democratic wave in the midterm elections, and as the primary races heat up, the looming question is whether they can defeat their more centrist opponents, who have the backing of the Democratic Party. (As The Intercept reported last week, a handful of progressives are out-raising their establishment opponents.) In Iowa, each of the Democrats is a first-time candidate, and the more central question is whether a district that has belonged to Republicans for decades can possibly turn from red to blue.

“We’re grateful for the amount of support this campaign has received,” Scholten said. “At first, our focus was to get out on the road to engage with as many people as possible. At the time, people liked us simply because I wasn’t Steve King. Now we’re seeing the shift to people responding to our message of inclusiveness.”

Scholten’s platform includes backing a $15 minimum wage, moving toward a single-payer health care system, and comprehensive immigration reform. He’s landed the support of Krystal Ball, founder of the People’s House Project, a group that supports progressive candidates. (The People’s House Project has not officially endorsed Scholten.)

Scholten was born in Iowa, but he was living in Seattle last year when Trump was elected president. He said he was inspired by the Seattle Women’s March to get more involved in the political process. “I just got so moved by the passion and raw energy that happened — I had a moment of clarity,” he said. Around the same time, his grandmother died in Iowa. After attending the funeral, he felt compelled to move home and get involved.

His immigration platform is diametrically opposite to where King stands on the issue. King has demanded surveillance of American mosques and cozied up to extreme nativist politicians like Hungary’s Prime Minister Viktor Orbán. Just two months ago, he condemned the concept of diversity altogether, adding to his long history of demonizing immigrants and promoting a homogenous culture.

In an interview with The Intercept, Scholten portrayed King’s views on immigration as not just out of touch with the northwestern Iowa district’s values, but also in conflict with its economic needs.

“In this district, we have so many rural communities that are just using immigrant labor as a backbone for their economy,” he said, “and to have him just spout these things it’s just, obviously on the moral side I’m against it, but on the just practical side, it goes drastically against the district.”

King defeated his Democratic opponent by 22.6 percentage points in 2016, a fact that is not lost on Scholten. Still, the former baseball player is encouraged by Democratic performance in Iowa’s special elections over the last year. “We’ve had five special elections at the state level since the presidential election, and the average of all of those are plus 29 toward Democrats,” he said.

Scholten’s strategy for taking back the district is to lean hard into pocketbook issues.

“Is there going to be a wave? Probably. But we’re not counting on it. I’m not out there being complacent and just expecting things to happen. I’m out there going into some of the typical areas that Democrats don’t get out to,” he said. “A huge problem of Democrats here is that there’s not a Midwest Democrat … who has kind of shown that we’re a different type of Democrat. [We want to] focus on the working class and at the end of the day, letting them know that I’m fighting for their job, I’m fighting for their paycheck and retirement, I’m fighting for their health care, and I’m fighting for their kids’ education.”

It’s not clear, though, that fundraising alone will be enough to flip the district. Timothy Hagle, who studies Iowa politics at the University of Iowa, told The Intercept he expects the 4th District seat to stay in King’s hands due to the huge Republican voter advantage.

“I’m not convinced yet that 2018 will be a wave year for Democrats, but even if it is it will be very unlikely that King’s re-election would be in question. King represents Iowa’s fourth Congressional District, this district has the largest voter registration advantage for Republicans. As of the beginning of this month, Republican voters outnumbered Democrats in IA04 by nearly 73 thousand,” he wrote in an email. “As much as some people, Democrats but some Republicans too, don’t like King, there would need to be a major problem of some sort involving him or an extremely strong primary challenger before his reelection is in danger.”

This year’s race in Iowa’s 4th District is notable both because of Democratic participation and because of a Republic contender who is challenging King with a platform that prioritizes action over rhetoric. Democrats have not had a primary in the district for the last three cycles, but this year, four first-time candidates have announced their intention to oust King. The other Democratic candidates are small-business owner Leann Jacobsen, who had raised $102,505 by the end of December; pediatrician John Paschen, with $74,887 raised by the end of December; and Paul Dahl, who announced he would be seeking the Democratic nomination in August, but has not yet filed an official congressional campaign committee with the Federal Elections Commission.

King’s primary opponent is Cyndi Hanson, a political newbie who has worked in education administration and as a college professor.

“The primary reason I decided to join the primary is because I’m tired of the gridlock in Washington and the divisiveness. Those are the two primary things,” Hanson told The Intercept. “Not getting things done and really focusing on rhetoric is frustrating to me.”

Hanson, a long-time resident of Sioux City, Iowa, is fighting an uphill battle. She announced her bid in early December and had raised just about $6,000 by the end of the month, trailing far behind every other candidate. In the primary race, King also has the advantage of support from the local Republican Party and the National Republican Congressional Committee, which spent $600,000 on him 2012, his last tough re-election fight. That year, he won re-election by 8 points. In 2016, King faced a primary challenge from state Sen. Rick Bertrand. To counter Bertrand, King scooped up endorsements from several of Bertrand’s colleagues in the state legislature, including Speaker of the House Linda Upmeyer.

“My view is very much appreciative of the variety of folks that we have in this country and in this particular district,” Hanson said, referring to people’s ideological and political differences. “I am not in favor of constructing a wall, or being entirely defensive in our approach to immigration. I think there is a role for protecting our security in the nation, and that’s definitely a rule we need to make sure we’re doing background checks and things like that.”

She is setting herself apart from King in her stance on Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals, the Obama-era program known as DACA that offered protections to unauthorized immigrants whose parents illegally brought them to the United States as children. When President Donald Trump cancelled DACA in September and kicked the can to Congress to resolve the issue, King said DACA recipients should “live in the shadows.” Like many other congressional Republicans, he does not believe Congress has a duty to create legislative protections for any class of unauthorized immigrants.

Hanson disagrees. “I do support legislative action on [DACA],” she said. “I think we have to have an answer for folks who are in limbo. I have talked with and I know a number of people who fall under DACA protection right now, and when you look at the requirements to be under that deferred action, these are some of our best and brightest.”

Her stance on immigration may be more in line with Republicans in the district than King’s; a Politico poll from September found that 68 percent of self-identified Trump voters think DACA recipients, known as Dreamers, should be allowed to stay in the United States. Last month, Trump presented a plan to Congress that would create a pathway to citizenship for 1.8 million unauthorized immigrants, in exchange for $25 billion for the border wall and heavy restrictions on family migration. (The president has been accused of using Dreamers as a bargaining chip to get funding for the border wall, a campaign proposal that had loud resonance with his base.)

Sioux County, which is represented in the state’s 4th District and votes overwhelmingly for Republicans, is a so-called sanctuary county, another indication that King’s anti-immigrant rhetoric is not necessarily reflective of attitudes in the district. The county has had a non-detainer policy since 2014, meaning it does not detain immigrants at the behest of federal immigration authorities without probable cause.

When Congress was debating the massive rewrite of the tax bill back in December, Hanson told The Intercept she was concerned that the proposal would boost deficits. Her outlook on health care is also starkly different from that of many in the GOP, who spent months last year trying to repeal and replace the Affordable Care Act. “There is some kind of a role for the government to play in making health care accessible,” she said, adding that she does not support a full repeal of the law.

Polling has generally shown that GOP voters are more favorable to repealing the law than other groups of Americans, but they are far from united over the congressional Republicans’ proposal to make that happen. A Quinnipiac poll showed that 48 percent backed the Republican alternative that made its way through Congress in May, shy of a majority.

“I think one of [the GOP’s mistakes] was trying to push something through on a straight partisan vote,” Hanson said about the party’s failure to pass health care reform last year. “That’s how we got the [ACA]. [It] was a pure partisan vote, and I think anytime that’s happened, we’ve left a lot of people and important opinions out of the mix.”

Iowa voters will head to the polls on June 5 to vote in the Democratic and Republican primary elections.

On the same day that he unveiled an urban agenda that highlights public transportation, affordable housing, and criminal justice reform, Michigan gubernatorial candidate Abdul El-Sayed came under fire in what he has described as a “birther”-like campaign questioning his eligibility to run for governor.

El-Sayed, a lifelong Michigander whose campaign has raised nearly $2 million, could be the first Muslim-American governor in the United States. He is considered the most serious challenger to Democratic frontrunner Gretchen Whitmer ahead of the August primary. And on Monday, Bridge, a Michigan magazine, published an article saying the stint El-Sayed spent as a medical student and professor at Columbia University in New York between 2013 and 2016 could be used against him, writing that “questions surrounding El-Sayed’s candidacy are an open secret among Democrats, particularly in southeast Michigan.”

Most of the Democrats and election lawyers the magazine interviewed spoke on condition of anonymity, because they “didn’t want to be caught up in a controversy.” A controversy has resulted nonetheless, with much of the Detroit press picking up the story. El-Sayed, in a fundraising email, said the article is the work of “establishment Democrats resorting to the kind of birther tactics that opponents to Barack Obama used to discredit his run for the presidency.”

Asked about the dispute, Whitmer’s campaign neither condemned nor supported the allegations against El-Sayed and had nothing to say about his response.

“Whitmer is not focused on chatter about who is or is not getting into the race and frankly there has been way too much distraction from how we fix our roads, grow our economy, and protect health care for Michigan families,” Annie Ellison, a spokesperson for the campaign, told The Intercept. “Anything that distracts from how we solve problems and put people first in this state is not something she’s paying attention to.”

The Michigan constitution provides that a candidate for governor must have been a “registered elector in this state” for four years prior to the election. El-Sayed grew up in metro Detroit. He played high school sports and started medical school at the University of Michigan. He completed his medical education in New York, but returned to Detroit in 2015 after being tapped to lead the Detroit Health Department. “While we knew the attacks were coming, we didn’t think they would come in the form of insider Democrats using Trump’s ‘birther’ tactics,” the campaign said in a statement.

The lawyers and Democratic officials interviewed by Bridge say that his time in New York — and the fact that he has a driver’s license in that state — means he does not meet the basic qualifications for office.

One Democratic elected official told the magazine, “There will be a court case, guaranteed. The only question is who is going to step up to take him out.” Another framed his questions about El-Sayed’s eligibility in the context of concern for the Democratic party. “One party leader said he fears a ‘nightmare scenario’ in which El-Sayed comes from behind and wins the Democratic Party primary in August, then is knocked off the November general election ballot through a lawsuit brought by Republicans,” the article says.

When he lived in New York, El-Sayed obtained a local driver’s license in 2013, which meant he had to discard his Michigan license. But the Detroit Free Press queried the secretary of state and was told that while it’s accurate that El-Sayed didn’t vote in the state of Michigan between 2013 and 2016, he didn’t lose his voter registration.

Fred Woodhams, a communications officer in the secretary of state’s office, offered similar comments to us and added that the office cannot make a final ruling until El-Sayed officially files paperwork on April 24.

“I can confirm that, according to the state’s voter records, El-Sayed has been continuously registered to vote since 2003. El-Sayed has not filed to run for governor so we have no further comment. Candidates have until April 24 to file,” Woodhams said in an email.

El-Sayed’s three years in New York did cause his voter registration to be placed on “cancellation countdown status,” but because he voted in November 2016 in Michigan, his status was returned to normal. He also owned a residence in Ann Arbor even while living in New York.

James Allen, a lawyer working with El-Sayed’s campaign, disputed the challenge to the candidate’s legacy in a statement to The Intercept.

The bottom line is this: Abdul is a qualified elector and is thus eligible to run for Governor because he is and has continuously been a resident and registered voter. There is always a danger when people try to make a legal claim without knowing all the facts. It’s like trying to make a diagnosis without ever seeing the patient. Abdul consistently and continuously maintained his connection to the state of Michigan as a registered voter and maintaining legal residency in the state between 2011-2015 (i.e. in the years required by law for him to be a qualified elector).

Robert Lenhard, a former chair of the Federal Election Commission who is serving as outside counsel to the El-Sayed campaign, issued a similar statement.

We have looked at this question closely and are confident Abdul El-Sayed is qualified to run for Governor of Michigan. He is a lifelong resident of Michigan. He was born here, went to school here, and married here. He has been a property owner, a taxpayer, a registered voter and a resident of Michigan throughout the qualifying period under State law. Michigan law has never held that absences from the state for school or work cause you to lose your residence. This issue is just a red herring.

Polls have shown Whitmer with a double-digit lead over the other Democrats in the race, and she has raised about $1 million more than El-Sayed has. (A December poll showed Republican Bill Schuette with a 3-point lead over Whitmer for the general election.) Still, El-Sayed’s campaign has garnered a wave of national media attention and his progressive politics have earned him the support of veterans of the 2016 Bernie Sanders presidential campaign. He is the 33-year-old son of an Egyptian immigrant, and he has drawn comparisons to Obama, owing in part to his youth and charismatic presence on the stump. (El-Sayed is, in fact, highly critical of the former president.)

With the possibility of a second government shutdown looming, the U.S. Senate on Monday afternoon focused its attention not on immigration or any other practical budgetary matter, but instead channeled its energy into an effort to curtail the reproductive rights of millions of women.

Specifically, the Senate convened on January 29 to consider S.2311, which would ban all abortions after 20 weeks, with narrow exception, and would threaten prison time for physicians who fail to comply with the law’s myriad requirements.

There is “no federal law protecting these young lives from abortion,” Iowa Republican Senator Joni Ernst, a vocal and strident abortion foe, told her colleagues from the floor. As a result, she said, thousands of lives every year are ended in pain. “This is unacceptable.”

The measure, known as the Pain-Capable Unborn Child Protection Act, rests on the idea that beginning at 20 weeks gestation a fetus can experience pain, and thus is tortured by abortion — a heavily disputed notion that rests on weak medical foundation. Although the enumerated legislative findings preceding the bill’s text suggest that a fetus can feel pain in the same way that a child or adult experiences pain, this claim is not medically accepted. The bill’s author is Sen. Lindsey Graham, and 43 of the 45 co-sponsors are men.

Under the bill, women would be barred from seeking to terminate a pregnancy from the 20th week, except where the termination is necessary to save the life of the woman, “endangered by a physical disorder, physical illness or physical injury” including life-threatening conditions “caused by or arising from the pregnancy itself.” The text does not include an exception for “psychological or emotional conditions.”

The bill would also carve out an exception for pregnancy arising from rape or incest, but only if the woman has obtained medical treatment or counseling in connection with the assault. In the case of minors the assault must have been reported to child welfare authorities or to police.

And even if those hurdles are cleared the proposed law would require the abortion doctor to perform the procedure “only in the manner which … provides the best opportunity for the unborn child to survive” — meaning by avoiding the most common and safest form of later-term abortion. Lawmakers in a number of states have tried to ban that procedure, known as dilation and evacuation, but have been blocked from doing so by the courts.

Aside from the questionable science and logic underpinning the measure, however, there are other problems with the bill — beginning with the fact that it would fly in the face of Roe v. Wade and other decisions that affirm a woman’s fundamental right to choose abortion before fetal viability, generally considered to begin at roughly 24 weeks. Beyond the constitutional problem, there are also practical considerations that make the bill an ill-considered one, not the least of which is that many life-threatening fetal abnormalities aren’t detectible until later in pregnancy. Meanwhile, the relentless passage by a number of states of unreasonable and unnecessary restrictions on abortion access have also served to delay a woman’s ability to access services in a timely manner and to increase the cost of care — onerous restrictions that hit poor and minority women particularly hard — and can force a woman to carry a pregnancy for a longer term than she might want to.

In short, the measure is not only unnecessary, but also dangerous. “This is yet another attempt to undermine women’s health and decision making that won’t stand up in a court of law, or in the court of public opinion,” Nancy Northup, president and CEO of the Center for Reproductive Rights said in a statement. “This bill is both unconscionable and unconstitutional.”

It isn’t the first time Congress has floated such a measure. It was first introduced in 2012, but would have applied only to the District of Columbia. A second try, floated in 2013, was national in scope but contained no exemptions for rape, incest, or a woman’s health. It passed the House, but was never voted on in the Senate. The House again passed such a measure in 2015, but the bill was blocked by the Senate. The House in October 2017 once again took it up and passed the measure, leading to today’s consideration by the Senate. Trump has said he would sign the measure should it make it to his desk.

Whether the Senate will actually muster the votes to pass the restriction is another thing altogether — the Republicans’ slim majority makes it unlikely. The effort is more political theater than practicality. While 21 states have passed some sort of pre-viability abortion cut-off bill — North Dakota placed its ban at six weeks into pregnancy, at a time when many women aren’t even aware that they are pregnant — in every state where such a measure has been challenged it has been blocked from taking effect, including by the U.S. Supreme Court, which thus far has declined to consider the issue.

That hasn’t stopped the states from moving forward, however. According to the Center for Reproductive Rights, 20-week bans are now pending in seven additional states (Missouri, Mississippi, New Jersey, New Mexico, New York, Oregon, and Washington) but have yet to gain traction.

In his opening comments before the Senate on Monday afternoon, Oregon Democratic Senator Ron Wyden noted that this measure is just one in a long line of assaults on women’s health care, which he called part of Trump’s agenda of “health care discrimination.” Indeed, 2017 was a rough year for parity in women’s health — including the administration’s determination to dismantle the Affordable Care Act and its guarantee of access to no-cost contraceptives.

When the current legislative session ends, Wyden predicted, the time the body spent “attacking the health care of women will be right up at the top of the list of how this Congress spent their day.”

The National Security Agency maintains a page on its website that outlines its mission statement. But earlier this month the agency made a discreet change: It removed “honesty” as its top priority.

Since at least May 2016, the surveillance agency had featured honesty as the first of four “core values” listed on NSA.gov, alongside “respect for the law,” “integrity,” and “transparency.” The agency vowed on the site to “be truthful with each other.”

On January 12, however, the NSA removed the mission statement page – which can still be viewed through the Internet Archive – and replaced it with a new version. Now, the parts about honesty and the pledge to be truthful have been deleted. The agency’s new top value is “commitment to service,” which it says means “excellence in the pursuit of our critical mission.”

Those are not the only striking alterations. In its old core values, the NSA explained that it would strive to be deserving of the “great trust” placed in it by national leaders and American citizens. It said that it would “honor the public’s need for openness.” But those phrases are now gone; all references to “trust,” “honor,” and “openness” have disappeared.

The agency previously stated on its website that it embraced transparency and claimed that all of its activities were aimed at “ensuring the safety, security, and liberty of our fellow citizens.” That is another sentence that has been discarded. The agency still says it is committed to transparency on the updated website, but the transparency is now described as being for the benefit of “those who authorize and oversee NSA’s work on behalf of the American people.” The definition of “integrity” has been edited, too. The agency formerly said its commitment to integrity meant it would “behave honorably and apply good judgment.” The phrase “behave honorably” has now been dropped in favor of “communicating honestly and directly, acting ethically and fairly and carrying out our mission efficiently and effectively.”

The new list of values includes the additions “respect for people” and “accountability.” But the section on respecting people is a reference to diversity within the NSA workforce, not a general commitment made to members of the public. Accountability is defined as taking “responsibility for our decisions.” The one core value that remains essentially unchanged is “respect for the law,” which the agency says means it is “grounded in our adherence to the U.S. Constitution and compliance with the U.S. laws, regulations and policies that govern our activities.”

In response to questions from The Intercept on Tuesday, the NSA played down the alterations. Thomas Groves, a spokesperson for the agency, said: “It’s nothing more than a website update, that’s all it is.”

]]>http://uproxx.com/news/nsa-core-values-honesty-deleted/feed/3nsa-grid-uproxx.jpguproxxinterceptCandidates Who Signed Up To Battle Donald Trump Must Get Past The Democratic Party Firsthttp://uproxx.com/news/candidates-battle-trump-democrats/
http://uproxx.com/news/candidates-battle-trump-democrats/#commentsWed, 24 Jan 2018 20:42:57 +0000http://uproxx.com/?p=401059166

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In the wake of the 2016 election, a group of despairing Democrats in Lancaster, Pennsylvania, formed a new political group to ensure that they would never be out-organized locally again. Faith leaders, small-business owners, social workers, nonprofit leaders, teachers, and students joined together as part of the historic dusting-off that was taking place all across the country. The group, which came to call itself Lancaster Stands Up, put its energy toward defending the Affordable Care Act from its multiple assaults in Washington and fending off the tea party-dominated state legislature in Harrisburg.

The group’s town halls and protests began to draw eye-popping numbers of people and even attracted national attention. With their newfound confidence, Lancaster progressives looked toward local and federal elections. The national press was captivated by the upsets across the state of Virginia in November, but that same night in Pennsylvania, Democrats across the state in local elections knocked Republicans out of seats they’d owned forever. The surge suggested that capturing the congressional seat covering Lancaster and Reading, which Democrats lost by 11 points in 2016, was well within reach.

In June, one of their own, Jess King, who heads a nonprofit that helps struggling women start and run small businesses in the area, announced that she would be running to take out Republican Rep. Lloyd Smucker in Pennsylvania’s 16th District. Nick Martin, her field director and another co-founder of Lancaster Stands Up, was a leading activist in the popular and robust local anti-pipeline movement, an organized network King was able to tap into.

She planned to focus a populist-progressive campaign on canvassing and harnessing grassroots enthusiasm. If suburban Republicans came along, attracted by the promise of Medicare For All or tuition-free public college, then great, but they would not be King’s target.

Lancaster Stands Up voted to endorse King, as did a local immigrant rights group with a broad grassroots network, Make the Road PA. Justice Democrats, a small-dollar operation that was backing leftist Democrats, got behind her as well. (The primary is set for May 15, with the Pennsylvania Supreme Court ruling on Monday that the GOP had illegally gerrymandered the state’s congressional districts, insisting they be redrawn before the primary. The decision could cut either way for King, depending on the shape of the new map.)

King then sought to secure the endorsement of the major players in Democratic Party circles. Her campaign reached out to EMILY’s List, which was founded to elect pro-choice women to Congress. EMILY’s List sent King a questionnaire, which she filled out and returned, affirming her strong support for reproductive freedom.

That was October, by which point her campaign had broken the $100,000 mark, a sign of viability she had hoped would show EMILY’s List that she was serious. “We followed up a few times after and did not hear back,” said King’s spokesperson, Guido Girgenti.

It turned out the Democratic Party had other ideas — or, at least, it had an old idea. As is happening in races across the country, party leaders in Washington and in the Pennsylvania district rallied, instead, around a candidate who, in 2016, had raised more money than a Democrat ever had in the district and suffered a humiliating loss anyway.

Christina Hartman, by the Democratic Party’s lights, did everything right during the last election cycle. She worked hard, racking up endorsements from one end of the district to the other. She followed the strategic advice of some of the most sagacious political hands in Pennsylvania, targeting suburban Republicans and independents who’d previously voted for candidates like Mitt Romney, but were now presumed gettable.

“For every one of those blue-collar Democrats [Donald Trump] picks up, he will lose to Hillary [Clinton] two socially moderate Republicans and independents in suburban Cleveland, suburban Columbus, suburban Cincinnati, suburban Philadelphia, suburban Pittsburgh, places like that,” Ed Rendell, the state’s former governor and titular leader of the state party, had predicted to the New York Times.

Hartman, with the energetic support of the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee and EMILY’s List, used her fundraising prowess to go heavy on television ads to drive her moderate message, confident that the well-funded Clinton ground game would bring her backers to the polls.

It did not.

Hartman was swamped by Smucker by 34,000 votes, badly underperforming even Clinton, who lost the district by about 21,000 votes. Trump and Smucker had indeed picked up some blue-collar Democrats, but not enough Republicans switched over to make up for the loss.

After spending $1.15 million in 2016, she had finished with 42.9 percent of the vote. In 2014, a terrible year for Democrats, a little-known Democrat spent just $152,000 to win almost the same share, 42.2 percent of the vote.

In July, Hartman announced she would make another run at it in 2018.

She quickly found the support of the state’s Democratic establishment, led by Rendell. “I’m proud to support her run for Congress in 2018. With her track record of success, we can count on Christina Hartman to show up for the people of PA-16 and to be part of the solution to end Washington gridlock,” Rendell said.

Along with Rendell came failed 2016 Senate candidate Katie McGinty; Attorney General Josh Shapiro; Auditor General Eugene DePasquale; Treasurer Joe Torsella; and Reps. Dwight Evans and Brendan Boyle of Philadelphia, and Matt Cartwright from Lackawanna, who politely dubbed her 2016 run “notable” in the campaign press release.

The simultaneous announcement of endorsements from the top elected officials in the party is a way to send a signal that the party has chosen its candidate. Another signal came in September, when Rep. Joe Crowley of New York, the House Democratic Caucus chair, gave money to Hartman through his leadership PAC. EMILY’s List followed suit, endorsing Hartman in December without extending a courtesy call to King’s campaign, Girgenti said.

“The fact that so many women are running is a good problem to have,” EMILY’s List’s spokesperson Julie McClain Downey told The Intercept. “Our goal as an organization is to help our candidates win and ultimately get more pro-choice Democratic women elected — sometimes that requires tough decisions. But we could not be more thrilled to see many women stepping up to run for office, and we hope to work with them for years to come.”

The decision stung, King said. “I’ve consistently supported full funding for women’s health, including contraception, and safe abortion as a last resort. I’m the only candidate running on Medicare For All and debt-free public college, policies that would hugely benefit women and working moms who struggle to make ends meet as insurance premiums and college tuition go up.”

In mid-October, the DCCC hosted a candidate week in Washington, bringing in Democrats running for the House from around the country for trainings and networking. Hartman was invited; King was not. As part of the candidate gathering, an off-the-record happy hour with national reporters was hosted by the Democratic National Committee in its “Wasserman Room.”

Resisting the Resistance

In his farewell address, President Barack Obama had some practical advice for those frustrated by his successor. “If you’re disappointed by your elected officials, grab a clipboard, get some signatures, and run for office yourself,” Obama implored.

Yet across the country, the DCCC, its allied groups, or leaders within the Democratic Party are working hard against some of these new candidates for Congress, publicly backing their more established opponents, according to interviews with more than 50 candidates, party operatives, and members of Congress. Winning the support of Washington heavyweights, including the DCCC — implicit or explicit — is critical for endorsements back home and a boost to fundraising. In general, it can give a candidate a tremendous advantage over opponents in a Democratic primary.

Prioritizing fundraising, as Democratic Party officials do, has a feedback effect that creates lawmakers who are further and further removed from the people they are elected to represent.

In district after district, the national party is throwing its weight behind candidates who are out of step with the national mood. The DCCC — known as “the D-trip” in Washington — has officially named 18 candidates as part of its “Red to Blue” program. (A D-trip spokesperson cautioned that a red-to-blue designation is not an official endorsement, but functions that way in practice. Program designees get exclusive financial and strategy resources from the party.) In many of those districts, there is at least one progressive challenger the party is working to elbow aside, some more viable than others. Outside of those 18, the party is coalescing in less formal ways around a chosen candidate — such as in the case of Pennsylvania’s Hartman — even if the DCCC itself is not publicly endorsing.

It’s happening despite a very real shift going on inside the party’s establishment, as it increasingly recognizes the value of small-dollar donors and grassroots networks. “In assessing the strength of candidates for Congress this cycle, we have put a greater premium on their grassroots engagement and local support, recognizing the power and energy of our allies on the ground,” said DCCC Communications Director Meredith Kelly. “A deep and early connection to people in the district is always essential to winning, but it’s more important than ever at this moment in our history.” The committee, meanwhile, has made major investments in grassroots organizing, field work and candidate training, which also represents a genuine change.

But change is hard, and it isn’t happening fast enough for candidates like King. So a constellation of outside progressive groups — some new to this cycle, some legacies of the last decade’s growth in online organizing — are stepping in, seeing explosive fundraising gains while the Democratic National Committee falls further and further behind. The time between now and July, by which most states will have held primaries, will be among the most important six months for the future of the Democratic Party, as the contests will decide what kind of party heads into the midterms in November 2018. The outcome will also shape the Democratic strategy for 2020, which in turn will shape the party’s agenda when and if it does reclaim power.

“We are proud to work with women, veterans, local job creators, and first-time candidates in their runs for Congress, whose records of service to our country and communities are being recognized – first and foremost – in the districts they aim to serve,” Kelly said.

In an era of regular wave elections — 2006, 2008, 2010, and onward — sustainable majorities may be elusive. The smartest play for the party that takes power, said Michael Podhorzer, political director for the labor federation AFL-CIO, is to seize the opportunity when a wave washes it into power, implement an aggressive agenda, and then defend it from the minority when the party is inevitably washed back out — much as Democrats did successfully with the Affordable Care Act, and as Republicans hope to do with tax cuts. It’s a strategy that means moving two or three steps forward and holding as many of those gains until power is reclaimed, then moving another two steps forward. But it’s only possible with candidates-turned-lawmakers ready to take bold action when they have the chance.

Prioritizing fundraising, as Democratic Party officials do, has a feedback effect that creates lawmakers who are further and further removed from the people they are elected to represent. In 2013, the DCCC offered a startling presentation for incoming lawmakers, telling them they would be expected to immediately begin four hours of “call time” every day they were in Washington. That’s time spent dialing for dollars from high-end donors.

Spending that much time on the phone with the same class of people can unconsciously influence thinking. There is, former Rep. Tom Perriello, D-Va. said in a 2013 interview, “an enormous anti-populist element, particularly for Dems, who are most likely to be hearing from people who can write at least a $500 check. They may be liberal, quite liberal, in fact, but are also more likely to consider the deficit a bigger crisis than the lack of jobs.”

Perriello was elected in the 2008 Obama wave and washed back out in the tea party one that followed. The time spent fundraising, he said in 2013, “helps to explain why many from very safe Dem districts who might otherwise be pushing the conversation to the left, or at least willing to be the first to take tough votes, do not – because they get their leadership positions by raising from the same donors noted above.”

Stephen Lynch, a House Democrat from Massachusetts, was elected in 2000 after a competitive primary. In 2013, he ran and lost a Senate special election against Ed Markey, with the party squarely behind Markey. “It’s challenging,” he said. “There were leaders in the Democratic Party that were discouraging people from donating to me.”

Lynch now faces a primary challenge from Brianna Wu, an engineer famous for taking on the “alt-right” in the GamerGate affair. In general, he said, the party should stay neutral.

“You’d rather have an election than a selection. Sometimes it actually makes our candidates stronger to have competition. I understand the parties are more concerned with the resources spent in the primary. Obviously if you have an uncontested primary, you save a lot of money, but I think from a leadership standpoint — small “l” leadership — you might develop a better candidate if they have a challenger early on.”

If money isn’t necessarily the best path to victory, that smart Washington-based operatives continue to make it the key variable regardless raises the question of what other motivations may be in play. For Lynch, the answer is simple: It’s a racket. “The Democratic and Republican parties are commercial enterprises and they’re very much interested in their own survival,” Lynch said. “The money race is probably more important to them than the issues race in some cases.”

The Intercept asked Lynch if the commercialization he referred to was for the benefit of the officials working in and around elections. “How much of the focus on fundraising,” we asked, “has to do with pumping money into this ecosystem of consultants and everybody else?”

“That’s what I mean,” Lynch said. “It’s a commercial enterprise.”

How Much Money Can You Raise?

The way to win party support is to pass the phone test.

In order to establish whether a person is worthy of official backing, DCCC operatives will “rolodex” a candidate, according to a source familiar with the procedure. On the most basic level, it involves candidates being asked to pull out their smartphones, scroll through their contacts lists, and add up the amount of money their contacts could raise or contribute to their campaigns. If the candidates’ contacts aren’t good for at least $250,000, or in some cases much more, they fail the test, and party support goes elsewhere.

Asked about the process, Kelly, the DCCC communications director, said, “Our support for a candidate is not based on the amount of money that their personal network can raise – in fact there are many strong candidates that we support with a limited ability to raise money from people that they know.”

That emphasis on fundraising can lead the party to make the kinds of decisions that leave ground-level activists furious. Take, for example, the case of Angie Craig, a medical device executive who ran for Congress in Minnesota’s second district in 2016 and has thrown her hat in the ring again.

The medical device industry is huge in Minnesota, and its outsized lobbying power is felt acutely in Washington. Despite spending $4.8 million, Craig lost by 2 points. That narrow defeat, though, belied the true failure of her campaign. She was, objectively, the least inspiring candidate up and down the ballot: Craig underperformed Clinton by 4,000 votes and even underperformed Democratic state Senate and House candidates by 13,000 and 2,000 votes, respectively. In 2012, the previous presidential cycle, congressional candidate Mike Obermueller spent $710,000 for a nearly identical level of support.

Jeff Erdmann thinks he knows why Craig lost. He was a volunteer for her in 2016, phone banking and going door to door. That spring, a voter asked him a question about Craig’s position on an issue that he couldn’t answer, so when Craig held a Q&A with the volunteers, he asked her if it was OK to direct voters to the website for an answer. “No, not really,” Erdmann recalled her saying, “because we haven’t developed our website yet because we don’t want the Republicans to know where we stand, and we haven’t seen end-of-summer polling yet.”

Later, he said, he was phone banking and asked a supervisor what message he should tailor to the rural part of the district, since the script seemed aimed at city dwellers. “Just tell them the trailer-court story, they’re not big thinkers out there,” he said he was told, referring to Craig’s childhood in a trailer home.

This time around, Erdmann decided to run himself, and he has the backing of the People’s House Project, a group founded by former congressional candidate Krystal Ball to back working-class candidates. Michael Rosenow, Erdmann’s campaign manager, said he and Erdmann reached out to the D-trip but had a hard time getting through. When they learned about a gathering the organization was hosting at an adjacent congressional district, they decided to crash it.

Erdmann has the kind of charisma you’d expect from someone who has coached high school football — and has had remarkable success in that role for more than two decades in a state that cares deeply about the sport. He has also taught American government for 27 years, but all of that had not prepared him for the conversation he was about to have with Molly Ritner, the midwest political director for the DCCC, at a hotel bar in Minneapolis called Jacques.

“It’s been weird for Jeff,” said Rosenow, who was there for the July 10 meeting. “The first question out of her mouth was, ‘How much will you raise?’”

They had raised $30,000 by that point, a figure that Ritner deemed unimpressive. (By the end of December, the campaign had raised around $115,000, according to Rosenow.)

“That’s not very much,” Rosenow recalls Ritner saying. “Really all we care about is, the more money you raise, the more you can get your message out.”

Erdmann tried to jump in, beginning to lay out his backstory, hoping to make the case that getting your message out doesn’t matter if voters don’t like the message. “He seems like he was grown in the tank for this district, but they didn’t care at all,” Rosenow said, “All she wanted to know was how much money he could raise.”

Ritner had been Midwest fundraising director at the DCCC in 2013 and 2014, before taking a break to run the campaign of the Democrat who lost the Vermont governor’s race to a Republican in 2016. She noted that Craig had ran an “amazing campaign” last cycle and asked if Erdmann had any big funders ready to get behind him. “Jeff laughed. He said, ‘I’ve been a teacher my whole life, how would I have big funders behind us?’” Rosenow recalled.

DCCC Chair Ben Ray Luján, a Democratic representative from New Mexico, was in his hotel room upstairs, Ritner told them, but he didn’t come down for the meeting.

Erdmann estimated the meeting lasted eight minutes. “She ordered a pop, got it, drank it, threw the number out that we had to hit, and left,” he said. On her way out, Ritner put $2 on the table. The check came to $2.26, before the tip. “I looked at Mike and said, ‘That is why the Democrats lose,’” concluded Erdmann.

Asked about the Craig endorsement and the meeting with Ritner, a DCCC official noted that Craig, in addition to national party support, has important endorsements from local unions and others in the district, and that Erdmann never requested that Luján be in the meeting with Ritner.

In order to run, Erdmann has taken reduced pay for a shrunken course load to give him time to campaign. His wife, a speech pathologist, has taken on a second job so they can continue to pay bills.

“They don’t want to talk about the civil war in the party, but when you treat us like hill people when we come up here, what do you expect?” concluded Rosenow.

Craig, fresh off her “amazing” 2016 race, is back again. Ritner, according to Erdmann and Rosenow, said the DCCC would remain neutral in the primary, but that didn’t last long. In November, the DCCC endorsed Craig, joining EMILY’s List and End Citizens United, the trio of groups that represents the party’s central authority. Last week, she picked up the backing of the Congressional Progressive Caucus PAC.

Minnesota’s complicated, multi-round caucus system begins February 6, when delegates who will participate in the later caucus are chosen.

Bankrolled By a Campaign Finance Reform Group

End Citizens United, an ostensible political reform group, was founded in 2015 by three consultants from Mothership Strategies, all veterans of the DCCC. End Citizens United has since paid Mothership Strategies over $3.5 million in fees, according to Federal Election Commission records. In its first few years, other campaign finance reform groups grew suspicious of the PAC, which they referred to as a “churn and burn” group dedicated to raising money by blanketing email lists with aggressive solicitations, a hallmark of the DCCC’s own email strategy. That reputation began turning around the last two years, as the PAC began putting significant money into important races and working more collaboratively with other groups in the space.

But its pattern of endorsements remains closely aligned with the types of candidates backed by the DCCC, though End Citizens United is often far ahead the party. (In 2016, End Citizens United backed progressive Zephyr Teachout, while the DCCC lined up behind her opponent, one of the few instances of the two diverging.) The PAC’s entry into the Minnesota race is particularly odd, given that Craig, while at the medical device company St. Jude Medical, directed the firm’s political action committee in the 2012 election cycle, after spending the previous six years on its board. The goal of the PAC was to buy influence with Republican and Democratic leaders, as well as members of the tax-writing committees, in pursuit of repealing the medical device tax that was a key funding mechanism of the Affordable Care Act. The effort eventually met with significant success.

While she ran it, the PAC spent heavily on Republican politicians, directing funds in the 2012 cycle to Republican Sens. Mitch McConnell, Finance Committee Chair Orrin Hatch, Scott Brown, Mike Enzi, Richard Burr, Bob Corker, and John Barrasso. Then-Speaker John Boehner and presumed-future-speaker Kevin McCarthy, as well as the chair of the House Ways and Means Committee, all got money from Craig’s PAC.

This, then, was the résumé that earned the support not just of the DCCC and EMILY’s List, but also of a group publicly committed to campaign finance reform. It’s as dissonant as the group’s support for Jason Crow in Colorado, a DCCC-backed candidate who works at a powerful law and lobbying firm.

A DCCC official, asked about Craig’s time running the corporate PAC, said it was unfair to accuse a married lesbian raising a family of being part of the political establishment, and that her business success was an asset, not a liability.

End Citizens United also stands by its endorsements of Craig and Crow. “Angie pledged to fight for reform, advocated for the public funding of elections, and ran a grassroots campaign with the support of many progressive organizations and local elected officials,” said End Citizens United’s Communications Director Adam Bozzi.

“Angie lost in 2016 by a narrow margin of 6,000 votes,” Bozzi added. “Unlike many House challengers in 2016, she was able to match the Democratic performance at the top of the ticket. Angie ran a strong campaign, in a tough district, in a difficult year for Democrats in Minnesota.”

“All Jeff talks about is political reform, so that was a shot to the heart,” said Rosenow, Erdmann’s campaign manager, on losing the endorsement. “If your goal is to get money out of politics, how in the fuck — I’m sorry, how in the hell are you backing someone who ran a corporate PAC?”

Why It Matters

In Congress, one man or woman can be more than one vote. Leaders of both parties exploit the donor habits of major industries by sticking the newest and most vulnerable members on key committees like Financial Services or Ways and Means. Veteran members have come to call the new arrivals “the bottom two rows,” a reference to their junior position in the amphitheater-style committee rooms. Their voting habits are distinguished by the centrism they believe brought them to office. A simple majority is only as strong as its weakest member, and giving those weak members outsized power dilutes legislation. That’s what happened in the 2009-2010 session, as then-House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., who was in charge of the DCCC, as well as committee assignments, packed key panels with centrist and conservative freshmen and sophomores.

Those centrists were there not because the nation demanded moderation, but because Democrats had recruited them in 2006 and 2008 and put them there. Rahm Emanuel, Pelosi’s lieutenant who, at the time, ran the DCCC, looked for wealthy candidates who could self-fund a race. “The most important thing to the DCCC then was if you were self-funding,” said Michael Podhorzer of AFL-CIO. “That moved candidates toward business centrists and their ability to last after that election was not that great. And it set the stage for Obama’s Democratic majority not being as aligned with his policies as a more progressive majority might have.”

And those committees stacked with new centrists delivered weaker legislation than they otherwise might have. In 2009, Democrats dialed back their ambitions when it came to the size of the stimulus, the strength of Wall Street reform, and the quality and extent of coverage that would be provided by Obamacare — all in order to accommodate centrist members representing swing districts. Polls show that the ACA is not unpopular because it is too progressive; rather, its problem areas are the elements of it that are too conservative — high premiums and high deductibles.

The DCCC’s failure to understand the changing demographics of the electorate is costing the party. “There’s a big change happening since 2012 in who votes for Democrats and that the kind of profile that at least had conventional wisdom behind it — someone who is a self-funder, probably a lawyer or business person, older, has paid their dues in state legislatures — is wrong for the time, that nationally about half of all people who vote for Dems now are people of color and that is not always reflected, obviously, in who gets in office, and there are a lot of folks who sit it out because they’re not seeing candidates who seem to represent them,” Podhorzer said. “The candidates have to sort of catch up to where their constituencies are.”

Yet the types of candidates Emanuel wanted to bring to Washington in 2006 are the same ones today’s House campaign arm is working to get elected. Even if you agree with the ideological approach, said 2016 congressional candidate Zephyr Teachout, it’s a flawed strategy structurally. Last cycle, the DCCC worked against Teachout, a progressive activist and law professor, in her primary campaign in New York. She went on to win it by 40 points anyway, pulling in 2 points more than Hillary Clinton, but still lost the general election.

“Structurally, they’re going to be idiots because there’s no way they can bring in the talent to do it right,” she told The Intercept of the DCCC’s approach to picking candidates. “Their strategy is stupid in the first place and bad for democracy, but then it’s really stupid because they have 26-year-olds sitting around who don’t know anything about the real world deciding which candidates should win.”

Former Rep. Dan Maffei, who won House elections in Syracuse in 2008 and 2012, but lost in 2006 and 2010, said that Teachout is right — that the country is just too big, and politics too unpredictable. “In 2006, they didn’t come because they thought I had no chance. In 2010, I didn’t get much help from the DCCC or outside groups because they thought I would win fairly easily, and I barely lost. The DCCC isn’t really able to predict,” he said, noting that some members who did get massive support in 2010 lost by 30 points.

This time around, the DCCC doesn’t want a replay of the 2016 presidential primary, with a big, roiling debate over the party’s fundamental values swamping warmed-over talking points about party unity and opposition to the GOP. (“End Citizens United” is one such example of unifying and progressive-sounding but ultimately toothless rhetoric.) The D-trip’s solution, though, amounts to asking the candidates on the Bernie Sanders side of the equation to play nice. Specifically, the DCCC memorandum of understanding, obtained by the Young Turks, asks candidates to make the following pledges:

The Candidate agrees to run a primary campaign that focuses on highlighting our shared values as Democrats and holding Republicans accountable.

The Candidate agrees not to engage in tactics that do harm to our chances of winning a General Election. In addition, the Candidate agrees to hold a unity event with their primary opponents following the primary.

The DCCC agrees to provide messaging and strategic guidance on holding the Republicans accountable and highlighting our shared values as Democrats.

Meet the Candidates

Fundamentally, what the DCCC’s phone test does is change the kind of person who can run and win, which then changes the kind of person who is representing the party to the public. Because the key variable that decides party support is fundraising, the DCCC’s decision-making is often ideological in its result, even if that was not the intent. By focusing on dollars, the party winds up with medical device executives, rather than American government teachers or football coaches.

In The Intercept’s review of a handful of primary races the party has gotten involved in, a few clear patterns emerged: There’s almost always an obvious political difference between the candidates the party backs and those it doesn’t, but in other areas — gender, race, sexual orientation, and professional background, for example — the congressional hopefuls on both sides of the divide are similarly diverse. Establishment Democrats of today are just as willing — or perhaps more so — to back a lesbian woman of color as they are a straight, white man, and the same is true on the left. In what is perhaps the crux of the issue, the Democratic Party machinery can effectively shut alternative candidates out before they can even get started. The party only supports viable candidates, but it has much to say about who can become viable.

Virginia District 2 — Karen Mallard is a public school-teacher in Virginia Beach, where she’s lived her entire life. Her story would be laughed out of a political novel as too on-the-nose if it weren’t real: When she learned that her father, a miner, didn’t know how to read, she set out to teach him and so, developed her passion for teaching. She formed her politics as a child standing on the picket line with her grandfather, also a miner. Trump’s election convinced her to become a first-time candidate, and she traveled to D.C. to drum up support, meeting with Danny Kedem at EMILY’s List. Kedem was fired up, Mallard said, and promised to arrange a meeting with his counterpart at the DCCC. But the meeting never happened because, Kedem later told her, the party had already settled on its man, Lynwood Lewis, When Lewis dropped out, the DCCC turned its attention to party leader Dave Belote, who ran briefly before dropping out after his mother fell ill. That still didn’t create an opening for Mallard, though. Two days after the stunning Virginia election, Elaine Luria, a Norfolk business owner and Navy veteran, called Mallard and told her she planned to get in. “This district is turning blue,” Mallard recalls Luria telling her. Mallard, relaying the conversation during an interview in December, said Luria told her that the DCCC had recruited her to run and would be supporting her after she announced in January. Sure enough, Luria announced her entry in January and was immediately endorsed by Lewis and Belote.

Mallard, however, thinks her experience in the community will pay off. “Everywhere I go, I see somebody I taught or coached. The DCCC needs to listen to people. Just because you can stroke a check for $100,000 doesn’t mean you’re the best candidate,” she said. “EMILY’s List gave me some consultants to hire, but I’m a public school teacher. I can’t afford to hire anybody.”

Nevada District 3 — Democrats and Republicans have battled for several cycles over this Henderson- and south Las Vegas-based seat. Susan Lee, an education advocate and the spouse of a wealthy casino executive, founded a homeless shelter and self-funded a failed bid for Congress for a different Nevada district in 2016. Now, despite a crowded field of several challengers, Lee is running in Nevada’s 3rd District with the support of DCCC and the backing of former Senate Democratic Leader Harry Reid. Jack Love, a first-time candidate who announced his campaign before Lee did, said he contacted the state party office and never heard back. The DCCC, End Citizens United, and other party PACs, Love said, declined to interview him. “They basically anointed one person without even speaking with me,” said Love, whose platform includes progressive policy priorities like Medicare For All, though his campaign bank account includes precious little money. “It’s clear to me that the only thing that matters to the party is who’s got the money.”

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Arizona District 2 — Last year, former Rep. Ann Kirkpatrick, a tough-on-immigration candidate who previously represented a northern Arizona district, bought a house to run for this Tucson-area seat. The DCCC, Emily’s List, End Citizens United, and other PACs coalesced quickly behind her campaign, ignoring a spirited challenge from former Assistant Secretary of the Army Mary Matiella. “A candidate’s viability is judged too quickly and too narrowly,” Matiella, who could be the first Latina to represent Arizona in Congress, told The Intercept. “The ability to immediately post a six-figure quarter isn’t just the primary consideration, it’s the only one. That kind of artificial barrier to political involvement is going to disenfranchise not only qualified candidates like myself, but thousands of new and optimistic voters the party should be engaging.” Matiella is backed by Justice Democrats, Democracy for America, and Project 100.

Kansas District 4 — In April, the political world turned bug-eye on Wichita, Kansas, as the results of a special election to replace Mike Pompeo came rolling in. For a tense stretch of time, it looked like James Thompson, running on a progressive platform that hewed closely to that of Sanders, might just pull off an upset in the heart of Koch Industries country. He wound up about 7,500 votes short, but immediately announced his plan to run for the same seat, this time against the Republican incumbent Ron Estes, in 2018. Washington Democrats were not particularly enthused about his chances. “I have never heard hide nor hair from the national party about the race,” Thompson said. His primary opponent, Laura Lombard, who moved back to the district from Washington, said she’s been in touch with the DCCC, but the party doesn’t like the odds of winning the district and isn’t helping in the primary.

Thompson is not clamoring for party support. “From what I’ve seen of the DCCC’s help, they want a bunch of promises made you’ll raise X amount of money, and you’ll spend this amount on TV ads.” he said. “At this point I’m not interested in having the DCCC, which has a proven losing record, try to come run my campaign.”

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Nebraska District 2 — The Democratic Party has largely lined up behind former Rep. Brad Ashford to take back this Omaha-based seat. The DCCC and other PACs have provided resources and endorsements to Ashford, who compiled one of the most conservative voting records for any Democrat in the House during his time in office. Kara Eastman, another Democrat competing in the primary on a populist campaign of single payer and tuition-free college, said that, after inviting her to candidate week, the party has attempted to shut her out of the campaign. “Well, we have been in contact with people from the DCCC since we started the campaign, and I was told that they would be remaining neutral until after the primary, and now it’s clear that’s obviously not the case,” Eastman, who has raised more than $100,000, told The Intercept. Eastman is backed by Climate Hawks, at least three local unions, and some local party officials. The Progressive Change Campaign Committee, which was founded in 2009 as a small-dollar alternative to the DCCC, is leaning toward planning to endorse her. In 2017, the national Democratic groups shocked Nebraska Democrats by pulling support for mayoral candidate Heath Mello over his past votes for bills to ban abortions after 20 weeks and the requirement that an ultrasound is used on a woman seeking abortion. Ashford, as a state legislator, voted for the same two bills, while Eastman is running on a solidly pro-choice platform. But that hasn’t prevented national Democrats from rallying behind Ashford. Last year, DNC Chair Tom Perez, in the wake of the Mello controversy, drew a line in the sand, saying that “every Democrat, like every American, should support a woman’s right to make her own choices about her body and her health. That is not negotiable and should not change city by city or state by state.”But that hasn’t prevent national Democrats from rallying behind Ashford. An EMILY’s List spokesperson said the group is monitoring the race but has yet to weigh in.

California District 50 — Ammar Campa-Najjar had his moment in the viral sun earlier last year, as the internet celebrated the hotness of this congressional candidate. He has since won the backing of Justice Democrats and a slew of local labor and Democratic groups. His opponent Josh Butner has said that he was not recruited by the DCCC, but encouraged to run by “local Democrats.” The New Democrat Coalition PAC, the pro-Wall Street wing of House Democrats, has given him $5,000. Butner was cited in two articles about the party’s ability to recruit veterans; the DCCC made sure to alert reporters about the coverage, issuing a press release. “I don’t want to assume foul play from the party, but there have been people suggesting they’re tipping the scales,” said Campa-Najjar. He said that on January 27, when the district does its pre-endorsement voting, he hopes to win the votes of those delegates by a wide margin to send a message. “If the most highly active people have already made their decision, it’s only a matter of time until the national party does,” he said. “Is there a lot of conventional thinking that’s leaning toward the profile of Josh? Yeah, absolutely, but we live in very unconventional times where candidates like Danica [Roem] beat Bob Marshall.”

Iowa District 1 — George Ramsey, a 30-year Army veteran, would be the first African-American to represent this district, though he is, by his own definition, not the most progressive candidate in the race. That would be Courtney Rowe, a Medicare For All backer, who has the support of the Justice Democrats and is working to rally the progressive base. But Ramsey, who is not too far to her right, has also been shut out by the party. In July, as he began to set up his Iowa congressional campaign, he reached out to the DCCC’s regional director. “We talked about what their expectations would be for their support for candidates. They made it very clear that fundraising was one of the primary mechanisms for their support,” Ramsey said, then clarified that fundraising was actually alone as the top priority. “They didn’t really put a number, but for us it was very clear that they’re looking for general election-type of numbers and not necessarily the type of numbers a candidate would need to get through a primary. They were talking about numbers that end in millions.” The DCCC is backing state Rep. Abby Finkenauer, as is End Citizens United and EMILY’s List.

Colorado District 6 — This suburban seat has long been an elusive Democratic target. One candidate for the district, clean energy expert and entrepreneur Levi Tillemann, charged that Rep. Steny Hoyer, the No. 2 Democrat in the House, pressured him to get out of the race in favor of Jason Crow, a veteran and partner at powerhouse Colorado law and lobbying firm, who is backed by the DCCC, the local Democratic congressional delegation, and End Citizens United. In a response to an inquiry from The Intercept, Hoyer did not deny pressing Tillemann, and said that he is “proud to join countless Coloradans in supporting Jason Crow in Colorado’s 6th District.” Not all Democrats are on board with the party’s strategy, though. State Party Chair Morgan Carroll protested the DCCC’s support for Crow over Tillemann, writing on Facebook, “The DCCC verbally said they would be neutral and in practice just endorsed one of the candidates in CD6.” Tillemann comes from a long line of political heavyweights in Colorado and moved back to the state to run.

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It Feels Like Déjà Vu

Democratic party officials are not, by nature, moved to deep reflection by election losses. They have a plan and they’re sticking to it. The bad news for grassroots activists is that the Democratic Party’s leaders cannot be reasoned with. But they can be beaten.

If Democratic leaders are getting the sense that 2018 could be a wave election much like 2006, it’s worth looking at the last time the party swept into the House. The DCCC that year was run by Rahm Emanuel, who institutionalized the practice of only endorsing candidates with a demonstrable ability to either fundraise or pay for their own campaigns. Democrats that year beat 22 Republican incumbents and picked up eight open seats that had previously been held by Republicans. Because winners write history, the strategy has become conventionally accepted as wisdom worth following. But taking a closer look at the races themselves suggests the DCCC was flying blind.

In New Hampshire, for instance, the DCCC backed state House minority leader Jim Craig over local activist Carol Shea-Porter, in a classic establishment-versus-grassroots campaign. The conventional wisdom suggested that Craig’s endorsements, his moderation, and his ability to fundraise were what was needed in the district. Instead, Shea-Porter took a firm stand against the war in Iraq and organized an army of foot soldiers on the ground. Vastly outspent, she smoked Craig by 19 points in the primary.

The DCCC, in its wisdom, wrote her off, declining to spend a dime on what they saw as a lost cause. She spent less than $300,000 and, on the back of progressive enthusiasm, won the general election. She is retiring in 2018.

In California, the DCCC backed Steve Filson, a conservative pilot, against Jerry McNerney, who Emanuel believed was hopelessly liberal. After McNerney beat him in the primary, a peeved Emanuel said the DCCC wouldn’t be helping him in the general. A coalition of environmental groups got behind him instead, and McNerney won anyway.

In upstate New York, Emanuel went with Judy Aydelott, a former Republican who was a tremendous fundraiser. She was crushed by environmentalist and musician John Hall, after which the DCCC shunned the race as unwinnable. Hall won.

Emanuel completely ignored Larry Kissell, running in North Carolina; with the help of netroots activists, he ended up losing after a recount by just 329 votes. In 2008, this time with DCCC support, he won by 10 points. Emanuel did the same with Dan Maffei, who lost in a recount by roughly 1,000 votes. With DCCC support the next cycle, he won in 2008.

It can be difficult for challengers to go up against the party because it is often hard to tell how or if the party is taking side

]]>http://uproxx.com/news/candidates-battle-trump-democrats/feed/4nancy-p-grid-uproxx.jpguproxxinterceptThe Islamic State Is The God That Failed In The Middle Easthttp://uproxx.com/news/islamic-state-god-fail-middle-east/
http://uproxx.com/news/islamic-state-god-fail-middle-east/#respondMon, 22 Jan 2018 18:40:22 +0000http://uproxx.com/?p=401054222

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“The revolutionary’s Utopia, which in appearance represents a complete break with the past, is always modeled on some image of the lost Paradise, of a legendary Golden Age,” wrote Arthur Koestler in a 1949 essay on his painful disillusionment with the Soviet Union. Koestler was a Hungarian communist intellectual who had been passionately committed to the cause, but later rebelled against the party over Joseph Stalin’s abuses. His essay was part of a collection of writings called “The God that Failed,” published by disaffected communists who had been forced to grapple with what appeared to be the failure of their revolution, as it veered into Stalinism.

“It [is] true that in the face of revolting injustice the only honorable attitude is to revolt, and to leave introspection for better times,” Koestler reflected. “But if we survey history and compare the lofty aims, in the name of which revolutions were started, and the sorry end to which they came, we see again and again how a polluted civilization pollutes its own revolutionary offspring.”

Looking back on the Arab Spring revolutions of the past decade, these sorry ends are not hard to find. These revolutions are also commonly judged to have “failed,” after briefly capturing the world’s imagination in 2011 when they first broke out. But the same set of circumstances that led to the uprisings in the first place continue to exist. And the ways in which different revolutionary movements failed are important, with relevant implications looking forward.

Among the revolutionaries there was a democratic trend that included liberal activists, nationalists, and Islamist groups willing to engage in the electoral process. Alongside the democrats was a violent, wildly utopian religious movement launched by groups like the Islamic State and Al Qaeda that tried to destroy Muslim societies and recreate them as a “caliphate” — an imaginary community where all the world’s Muslims would ostensibly live happily-ever-after under the rule of jihadis.

The democratic movements were largely crushed by the brutal response of local dictators. The jihadis, meanwhile, briefly managed to achieve a version of their caliphate, only to see it destroyed in a final cataclysm. But while the core idea that animated the Arab democrats continues to be attractive despite its repression, the utopian project of the jihadis has been undermined in critical ways by its failure.

The idea of a “caliphate” today looks like just another modern radical movement that promised a new paradise on earth, before violently destroying itself and its adherents.

Not only did the jihadis lose in their grand confrontation with local regimes and the international system — a confrontation that they repeatedly promised that God would not let them lose — their brief attempt at implementing their ideal society was stained by an unforgettable litany of crimes and disasters. Rather than inaugurating a new Golden Age of strength and security, the idea of a “caliphate” today looks like just another modern radical movement that promised a new paradise on earth, before violently destroying itself and its adherents.

The defeat of the Islamic State might ironically be a letdown for some in the West. Western politicians, military officials, and their assorted hangers-on in the media and think tank world have already begun planning for a long war against “global jihadism,” an analogue to the Cold War that would justify their inflated budgets and provide a continued sense of purpose. Unlike communism or nationalism, however, there’s little indication that apocalyptic jihadism as an ideology is attractive or sustainable enough to meaningfully compete with Western democracies in the way that those ideologies did. Diehard Islamic State sympathizers may continue committing individual acts of terrorism for the foreseeable future and mini proto-states pledging allegiance to the group will still proliferate, but the rapid rise and fall of the caliphate demonstrates an important lesson about the fundamentally self-destructive nature of millenarian movements.

In his 1962 book, “The Politics of Cultural Despair: A Study in the Rise of Germanic Ideology,” the German-American historian Fritz Stern described the ideological project that gave birth to Nazism in terms eerily portentous of the Islamic State. “The movement did embody a paradox: its followers sought to destroy the despised present in order to recapture an idealized past in an imaginary future,” Stern wrote. “They sought a breakthrough to the past, and they longed for a new community in which old ideas and institutions would once again command universal allegiance.”

In the end, the Nazis’ attempt to recreate an idealized past led to disaster and humiliation, and the Islamic State, too, is poised to go that way. With the immediate crisis posed by the group having mostly subsided, it’s becoming possible to look at the Islamic State in clearer context. Despite its propaganda and the sensational image portrayed in the Western press, the group was less a harbinger of the apocalypse and more like one of history’s many desperate and fanatical radical movements, burning quickly and brightly before settling into a pile of ash. Understanding the depths and reasons for the Islamic State’s failure — how it fizzled out — might be the first step to preventing another group like it from again gaining a hold on the world’s collective imagination.

Understanding the depths and reasons for the Islamic State’s failure might be the first step to preventing another group like it from again gaining a hold on the world’s collective imagination.

Yassin al-Haj Saleh has had closer experience with the brutality of the Islamic State than most. A longtime Syrian democratic activist and native of Raqqa, Saleh lived through the Syrian uprising and is the author of “The Impossible Revolution: Making Sense of the Syrian Tragedy.” In 2013, Saleh’s brother Feras was kidnapped by Islamic State militants. The same year, his wife, Samira Khalil, was detained along with three other well-known activists by a separate group of Islamist militants near Damascus. None have been heard from since.

Saleh has a unique perspective on Salafi jihadism, the radical religious ideology that drives the Islamic State and similar groups, borne in part from his experience of the group’s rise. Rather than a traditional religious ideology or political movement capable of appealing to broad segments of society, Saleh says that the harsh, unrealistic, and self-defeating nature of jihadism alienates all but a fringe.

Instead of a return to traditional values, Saleh describes Salafi jihadism as the latest iteration of a quintessentially modern phenomenon: nihilism. A philosophy with its roots in 19th century Europe, nihilism denies that the material world and life itself hold any intrinsic value or meaning. While nihilism does not inevitably lead to violence, its world-denying tenets helped inspire numerous campaigns of terrorism by its adherents. In Europe, where atheism had already become normative, local expressions of nihilism were atheistic. But in Muslim-majority societies like Syria, nihilism “looks for its pillars of support in the religion of Islam,” Saleh says.

The nihilism analogy goes deeper into the practices of groups like the Islamic State. Suicide and murder are normally considered to be grave sins by Muslims. But during periods of widespread crisis and trauma, radical groups like the Islamic State exploit a cognitive opening to try to portray these acts as acceptable, even positive. The religious concept of an afterlife is also twisted to support a nihilistic worldview, by devaluing acts committed in the material world in favor of a promised hereafter.

Yet this radical inversion of traditional values is not one that has shown itself to be appealing to large groups of people in Muslim countries. Rather than a mass movement with deep social and cultural roots, Saleh says that jihadism relies mainly on exploiting conditions of crisis to coerce the support of people who would normally find its tenets repellent.

“Although they can succeed in exploiting the failures of other opposition movements and the hatred of local dictators, the nihilist groups do not have appeal on a popular level.”

“Although they can succeed in exploiting the failures of other opposition movements and the hatred of local dictators, the nihilist groups do not have appeal on a popular level. They don’t think in terms of broadening their social base of support or about appealing to wider sectors of the population,” Saleh says. “These groups know very well that they don’t have popular support, which is why when they take over territories they begin killing the local people and hanging their bodies in the streets. They want people to be afraid of them.”

According to the State Department, an estimated 40,000 people are believed to have migrated to Islamic State territory as foreign fighters, from upwards of 100 countries. The number was significant to the battles in Iraq and Syria, but it represents a tiny fraction of the world’s 1.2 billion Muslims, the broad target audience for jihadis’ ideological message. Despite making sophisticated use of new propaganda technologies and having its message amplified by the world’s biggest media outlets, in the end the Islamic State was only able to recruit at the margins of Muslim societies and their diaspora communities.

“The majority of those that left home to join Islamic State were people who had social problems, had been in jail, or were otherwise despised in their own societies,” Saleh says. “Jihadism may have offered a solution for people like this, but it was a solution for individuals — maybe hundreds or even thousands of individuals — but not for whole sectors or classes of people.”

This rational perspective of the threat posed by the Islamic State flew in the face of messages from both sides of the conflict over jihadism, the extremes who both sought to raise the specter of an apocalyptic clash of civilizations. For those purporting to oppose jihadism, this view was massively counterproductive: Instead of treating the Islamic State and terrorism in general as a policing and governance problem, cultural and political pathologies in the West contributed to a distortion and magnification of the jihadist threat that has proven very helpful to the jihadis in building their own mystique.

“There is a lot of attention to jihadism because it feeds into the narrative of the U.S. global war against terrorism and because Western media and politicians are generally obsessed with Islam. But I don’t think we should be deceived by this — we are not talking about a civilizational conflict here,” says Saleh. “These are armed groups that combine religion with military training and fascist educational indoctrination. But they are mainly concerned with violence. They do not have any meaningful social, political, or cultural base, nor do they offer any real emancipatory potential for Muslim societies.”

In a videotaped address given in 2014 from Baghdad’s historic Al Nuri Mosque, the Islamic State’s leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi announced that his group had reinstated the “caliphate,” a medieval form of Islamic governance that predominated in the region before the emergence of nation-states. It was a declaration that touched on a long history in the Muslim world. The office of the caliphate was first created during the seventh century, at the time of Islam’s founding, and continued to exist in symbolic form in Istanbul until 1924, when it was abolished by Turkish nationalists.

Despite the global attention that their inflammatory proclamation received, it was never clear what the Islamic State actually meant to convey with the announcement of a “caliphate.” The medieval caliphates were not utopian dreamlands of peace and prosperity, nor did they claim to be. The real-world caliphates were fairly standard political entities of their time; they made alliances with Christian kingdoms, had minorities living in their territories, and were sometimes led by caliphs who indulged in wine, poetry, and other worldly pursuits.

The Islamic State also did not bother explaining how their caliphate was going to solve the problems of the people they claimed to represent. Instead, like other modern radical movements of the past century, Baghdadi simply proclaimed the revival of a past Golden Age and told his followers that supporting the group would be a panacea for their ills. In their hysterical propaganda, the Islamic State promised that it would soon “eliminate the grayzone” — a reference to the area of peace and cohabitation between peoples — triggering a clash between Muslims and non-Muslims worldwide.

Despite the provocative violence and rhetoric, the caliphate failed to achieve any of its goals. From the accounts of those now emerging from its rule, life under the Islamic State was a dystopian nightmare. And instead of fighting imperial “crusaders,” the group spent most of its time killing other Muslims and local minority communities who opposed it. Although the level of terrorist violence the group inspired was enough to disturb Western societies, it was far from what was needed to follow through on the promise of crippling or destroying the Western world.

“ISIS faces the same problems that the non-jihadi militant groups do, which is that they don’t actually have any proposals about how to tackle the real problems.”

For the people of Middle Eastern countries who rose up several years ago against local dictators in particular, exchanging the brutality and incompetence of their old leaders for the brutality and incompetence of the jihadis hardly seemed like an attractive proposition. The Islamic State’s global recruitment call succeeded in attracting many zealots and the group’s leaders were able to win the allegiance of some local tribes in Iraq and Syria. But ultimately the fantastical promise of a caliphate was not enough to make up for the complete lack of any other appealing ideological program.

“ISIS faces the same problems that the non-jihadi militant groups do, which is that they don’t actually have any proposals about how to tackle the real problems — socioeconomic, political, and generational — that Muslim communities around the world face,” says Chris Anzalone, a research fellow at Harvard’s Belfer Center International Security Program and an expert on contemporary jihadi movements. “In many ways, they actually mimic the regimes that they claim to reject — they just Islamize the language around their governance. And, in general, when they take over areas from local regimes, they do a worse job than the people they are replacing.”

Even when trying to appeal to people for whom “purely” theological questions take precedence over economics or politics, the Islamic State had a serious problem: While many Western media outlets were glad to accept the group’s propaganda about its religious legitimacy, for many conservative Islamists, the caliphate appeared as an alien and unorthodox intrusion into their religion. It was a political project that, like every other attempt to create a heaven on earth, was radically modern in nature. Instead of an ideological alternative to the West, the Islamic State behaved more like a negative image of Western modernity, the object of its obsession.

“While recognizing that it draws on historical and medieval elements, the idea of a caliphate is in its entirety a modern idea,” says Anzalone. “The [jihadi’s] self-definition and structure is almost entirely predicated on a reaction to modernity; they mimic the nation-state down to their idea of what they are [and] what are they not. It’s not just Islamic State but Al Qaeda as well: Everything that they propose is simply a reaction to the West, the secular nation-state, and the international system.”

The depraved and voyeuristic nature of the Islamic State’s violence begins to make more sense in this context. The religion of Islam generally contains rules and prescriptions on violence, including, for example, the proscription on burning people with fire, as the Islamic State notoriously did to a Jordanian pilot who it captured in 2014. But, in the Islamic State’s ideology, these religious rules became secondary to what was by far its most important concern: antagonizing and horrifying Westerners. Even the group’s adapted slogan — “Die in your rage” — reflected this all-consuming preoccupation.

German cultural historian Arthur Moeller van den Bruck, whose writings later helped create the basis for the Nazi movement, counseled a similar ideology based on rejecting modernity, antagonizing “the West,” and even embracing self-destruction as a political strategy.

“Our calling is to be an irritation of the spirit to the people of comfort,” Moeller van den Bruck declared in 1924, writing about the purifying power of violence and suicide in terms that might as well have come from today’s jihadis. “Our miracle will be: when we, to whom it has been intimated that we should annihilate ourselves, will achieve out of our revolutionary suicide, our political rebirth.”

The desperate and nihilistic ideology inspired in part by Moeller van den Bruck’s thoughts briefly succeeded in creating a mass following in 20th century Germany, the place where it was first articulated. In its Islamic expression, similar ideological proclivities have gained limited traction, reaching a fever pitch in the Islamic State, which was defeated militarily with much greater ease than Nazism. Yet even if jihadi ideology falls out of fashion following its recent failures, stabilizing the Middle East and guaranteeing that such movements do not arise in the future requires addressing the root causes of why militancy — both jihadi and non-jihadi — has been endemic to the region over the past century.

Since the collapse of the Ottoman Empire and the end of Western colonial mandates in the Middle East, this region has seen an endless stream of militant movements arise. These movements have been variously leftist, nationalist, and Islamist in orientation. The emergence of the Salafi jihadis in recent years is only the latest in this succession of ideologies that have all attempted to do one fundamental thing: solve the problems of the underdeveloped masses of Middle Eastern countries.

“There is an interesting effect that, when the left and the nationalists are eliminated or marginalized from Muslim public discourse, it is the radical religious groups, with some exceptions, that get to claim the mantle of being anticolonial and anti-imperial,” says Omid Safi, a professor of Asian and Middle Eastern Studies at Duke University. “A few decades ago, even passionately Muslim intellectuals were also leftists and socialists. But when these leftist movements were persecuted and destroyed, people had to turn elsewhere for help when they felt the power of muscular Western militarism encroaching on their land, culture, and values.”

Unlike the xenophobic and world-denying nihilism of Salafi jihadism, leftist politics in the past century actually offered solutions to many of the problems facing people in postcolonial countries. Despite the eventual corruption and defeat of most regional communist parties, many of these movements, in contrast to the jihadis, also succeeded in producing genuine intellectuals around the world who were capable of expressing a crisis of conscience over the crimes committed in their name.

“Though we wore blinkers, we were not blind. Even the most fanatical among us could not help noticing that all was not well in our movement.”

While the movements were not morally equivalent, sometimes the intensity of the conversion experience for jihadi recruits and former communist revolutionaries were not dissimilar. Arthur Koestler described his initial belief that Soviet communism would liberate the oppressed masses of Europe as a feeling of “mental rapture,” in which “the new light seems to pour from all directions across the skull [and] the whole universe falls into pattern like the stray pieces of a jigsaw.” The euphoria of that conversion was equaled only by the pain of his eventual disillusionment.

“Though we wore blinkers, we were not blind,” Koestler reflected. “Even the most fanatical among us could not help noticing that all was not well in our movement.”

Surveying the destruction of ancient cities like Raqqa and Mosul, and the millions of shattered lives left in the wake of the Islamic State’s failed revolution, it’s hard not see the group, now stripped of its power, as anything other than the latest, most fanatic attempt to remedy the ills of long-tyrannized societies. Although jihadis may be killed and their ideology may even fall out of favor, until the people of the region experience genuine emancipation, there is unlikely to be an end to terrorist violence, nor to radical armed groups promising to bring heaven down to earth by any means necessary.

Nine months after pipeline opponents in Washington state staged a protest that blocked freeway traffic, Facebook ended a protracted legal standoff with a county prosecutor, turning over detailed records on the indigenous-led group behind the demonstration. Despite the fact that no criminal charges have been filed in connection with the February action, Whatcom County Prosecuting Attorney David McEachran repeatedly sought a warrant for the group’s Facebook page, ultimately securing private information including messages to and from the page and a list of everyone “invited” to the protest event.

McEachran’s first two warrant applications were withdrawn after the American Civil Liberties Union and Facebook raised objections. On the third try, however, the warrant was granted thanks to Facebook’s suggestion that McEachran’s office seek formal guidance from the nation’s top law enforcement agency, the Department of Justice. A public records request filed by The Intercept shows that the local agency and its federal counterpart cooperated to draft the ultimately successful warrant using a DOJ template.

Activists affiliated with the climate justice group, Red Line Salish Sea, view the investigation as retaliation for their February protest, a march against local fossil fuel projects and President Donald Trump’s executive orders expediting construction of the Dakota Access and Keystone XL pipelines. “Not only does this warrant attempt to scare people from organizing, this warrant attempts to scare people from even looking at information,” Tina McKim, a former administrator of Red Line’s Facebook page, wrote in a declaration.

The DOJ’s intervention in the case makes it the latest example of the Trump administration’s direct involvement in law enforcement actions against protesters who allege they are being targeted for protected First Amendment activity: On the other side of the country, the DOJ is pursuing decades of prison time for protesters, journalists, medics, and legal advocates arrested during the anti-Trump “J20” demonstrations on Inauguration Day. In that case, too, the prosecution secured warrants for the Facebook page and website used to organize the protests. Now, Standing Rock-inspired activists in Whatcom County find themselves on the front lines of the battle over Americans’ right to anonymously organize with political groups.

The case began on February 11, three weeks after Trump took office. Red Line Salish Sea, formerly known as the Bellingham NoDAPL Coalition, organized a march to oppose Trump’s executive orders as well as proposed fuel export facilities in the Pacific Northwest. (The group’s name refers to the Salish Sea, which extends from Olympia, Washington, into Canada; activists consider the region a red line that new fossil fuel expansion should not cross.) About 100 protesters eventually made their way to Interstate 5, where they slowly brought traffic to a stop. Though the protest blocked traffic for an hour, no arrests were made and demonstrators were allowed to peacefully disperse.

However, a driver 2 miles south of the march was cited for “inattentive driving” after colliding with a vehicle that was slowing down for the traffic jam, causing it to bump into another vehicle. Two minor injuries — “soreness in shoulders” and a seat belt-inflicted injury to the sternum — resulted from the accident. Five days later, the prosecutor’s office launched a disorderly conduct and reckless endangerment investigation into the protest, citing the collision as well as the case of a man stuck in traffic who was forced to urinate in a bottle. The county sought the identity of organizers and proof that they coordinated and concealed a deliberate plan to block the freeway while disregarding the risks involved. The investigation’s first step: serving Facebook with a warrant for Red Line’s Facebook page, including all messages, photos, videos, wall posts, and location information associated with the page before and after the protest.

That first warrant was withdrawn by McEachran in March after the ACLU argued it would chill political speech and violate basic First Amendment protections by seeking “data related to an unknown number of individuals who merely interacted with the group via Facebook.” More than 900 individuals or organizations “liked” Red Line’s Facebook page, the ACLU noted, and many more potentially communicated with the page in other ways. A second warrant more narrowly focused on content related to the I-5 demonstration was soon submitted and approved by Whatcom County Superior Court Judge Charles Snyder, but it too was withdrawn after Facebook insisted it was too specific and the company could not filter results but could only provide “categories” of information.

Then, according to testimony by McEachran’s deputy prosecutor, Facebook suggested the county reach out to the Department of Justice for help in drafting a third warrant. Emails obtained via public records request show that in May, senior DOJ attorney Jared Hosid exchanged drafts of the third warrant with Whatcom County Sheriff’s Detective John Allgire. Hosid gave specific advice on how to word the warrant, which was based on a template provided by the department’s Computer Crime and Intellectual Property Section.

The Intercept sent a letter seeking comment to McEachran’s office, which does not communicate with the media by phone or email, but has not received a response. The DOJ did not respond to request for comment. When asked about the advice Facebook provided to county prosecutors, a spokesperson for the company said Facebook has a law enforcement outreach team that fields questions from law enforcement about company policy.

McEachran’s investigation seeks evidence of minor crimes, but Larry Hildes, a public interest attorney representing Red Line and two former administrators of the group’s Facebook page, views the prospect of reckless endangerment charges as disproportionate to the facts of the case. “Firing a gun into the air above a crowd or driving a car at someone to intimidate them and then swerving out of the way, that’s reckless endangerment,” he says. “Peacefully walking onto a street is not.”

A month after the protest, McEachran live-streamed into the state Capitol to testify in favor of an economic disruption bill that would allow Washington’s law enforcement agencies to thwart protests with criminal charges conferring significant prison time. The bill, since defeated, would have made obstructing commerce (or planning a protest that obstructed commerce) a class C felony, punishable with up to five years in prison. McEachran, Whatcom County Sheriff Bill Elfo, and the local State Patrol chief pointed to Red Line’s protest as proof of the bill’s necessity.

They were not alone: In 2017, sweeping domestic terrorism bills increasing penalties for protests that “disable” streets, public buildings, or critical infrastructure were passed in Georgia and Florida. According to the International Center for Not-for-Profit Law, new protest suppression bills have also been passed in Oklahoma, South Dakota, North Dakota, North Carolina, and Tennessee. Now, model legislation is being pushed in state legislatures by the influential American Legislative Exchange Council to further criminalize pipeline protests.

This view of protests as quintessentially criminal conduct, rather than protected First Amendment activity, was captured in the explicit justification McEachran’s office provided for its investigation of Red Line’s February action, according to a legal brief filed by Hildes. “The state seeks to justify [the warrant] by comparing this situation to the infamous D.C. sniper incident,” the brief notes, referring to a series of attacks in 2002 in which hidden snipers evaded law enforcement for three weeks, killing 10 and wounding three.

“The warrant and the county’s pleadings do not so much as acknowledge the existence of the First Amendment, nor that this was a demonstration, but simply treat it as supposed criminal activity like a bar fight or drunk driving,” Hildes wrote.

Merely granting the warrant, Hildes argued, would immediately violate people’s rights to anonymously associate with a political group. He cited the landmark 1958 Supreme Court decision NAACP v. Alabama, which secured the right to “associational privacy.” The court ruled Alabama could not force the NAACP to turn over a list of its members, which the state had demanded in the midst of its unsuccessful effort to close down the group’s state chapter. “Privacy in group association,” the court wrote, “may in many circumstances be indispensable to preservation of freedom of association, particularly where a group espouses dissident beliefs.”

But on November 17, the Washington Court of Appeals denied Hildes’s effort to halt the warrant, saying the NAACP precedent did not apply. The warrant handed over all stored content, including deleted content, associated with Red Line’s Facebook page from February 5 to February 15, including Facebook account names and ID numbers of everyone “going,” “interested,” and “invited” to the February 11 event; personally identifiable information on all administrators or moderators of the page; all status updates, messages, videos, photographs, articles, wall postings, event postings, comments, and tags; and images or videos shared by, posted to, and uploaded to the page.

The court concluded that the warrant’s use of an independent “privilege team” to process the data would shield personal and First Amendment-protected information not related to McEachran’s criminal investigation. According to the testimony of Whatcom’s deputy prosecutor, it was the DOJ’s idea to set up the independent team that ensured Facebook’s compliance with the warrant.

“We were … assured that an independent team will review and separate out only the relevant data for the criminal investigation,” Facebook told The Intercept. The setup is similar to the court-appointed “special master” requested by the ACLU after the D.C. Superior Court gave the federal government access to the Facebook page used by organizers of the J20 Inauguration Day protests. In the end, the court did not grant the ACLU’s request in the J20 case, but it did restrict the warrant by requiring some prior redaction by Facebook and court-approved protocols for how the prosecution could search the page. (The J20 warrant was filed after nearly 200 people were charged with felony crimes, however, whereas the Whatcom warrant was justified only by McEachran’s misdemeanor investigation.)

In Whatcom, there is reason to doubt the independent team will truly shield people’s First Amendment activity from government oversight — because the team consists of a prosecutor and an outside detective appointed by McEachran’s office, the Washington State Patrol, the Whatcom County Sheriff’s Office, and the Bellingham Police Department.

The court’s November 17 decision also found that the two former administrators of Red Line’s Facebook page represented by Hildes did not have legal standing to seek to quash the third warrant. The only entity that had that privilege, according to the court, was Facebook, which passed on the opportunity.

In the J20 case as well, Facebook users and third parties did not have standing to intervene legally to quash the Facebook warrants. Scott Michelman, an attorney at the ACLU of D.C. who was involved in challenging the J20 warrants, thinks that limiting standing to warrant recipients makes it too difficult for platform users to protect their privacy. “[Facebook] users and third parties should be able to protect their own rights in court. Courts should be open to these types of challenges, or else everyone has to rely on Facebook,” he said.

Facebook does not have a universal policy on challenging warrants in court. “We scrutinize every request for user data and push back when they are legally deficient or overly broad,” a Facebook spokesperson told The Intercept, pointing to a 2014 example in which the company sought to challenge a warrant that demanded “nearly all data” from the accounts of 381 people, 62 of whom were later charged with disability fraud.

In the Whatcom case, after being held in contempt of court for not complying with the warrant on time, and facing the onset of a $2,000 per day sanction, Facebook handed over the data to McEachran’s office on November 20. “We notified the affected people and held off on complying with the warrants while two courts heard and rejected their claims,” the Facebook spokesperson told The Intercept.

In its decision, the Washington Court of Appeals argued that one reason the NAACP precedent did not apply was that unlike in NAACP, those targeted by the Whatcom warrant would not face “economic reprisal, loss of employment, threat of physical coercion, and other manifestations of public hostility” as a result of their association with Red Line being exposed.

Michelle Vendiola, a member of the Walter River Paiute Tribe and a former administrator of Red Line’s Facebook page, begs to differ. After the freeway protest, activists associated with the anti-pipeline group were the recipients of a surge of online harassment; commenters suggested they should have been run over and posted their personal information on the internet. A photo of Vendiola’s business card circulated online, leading to an influx of public pressure on her employer, Western Washington University, to fire her. The incident led a senior assistant to the university president to publicly condone the protest as an “illegal act” and “counterproductive.” Western Washington University did not respond to a request for comment.

Around that time, the Washington State Patrol filed a freedom of information request for all of Vendiola’s email communications and web history stored on university computers and servers. One of her colleagues also initiated an ethics investigation, alleging she used public resources to organize the February protest. After the state searched her work computer, email communications, and web history, the investigation concluded that no violation had occurred. In July, however, the university did not renew her contract.

“They’re specifically trying to find evidence to bring charges against me,” Vendiola said of the prosecutor’s office. “It’s really frustrating to wait and wonder.” The statute of limitations for filing disorderly conduct charges against the protesters expires next month, on February 11.

Despite McEachran’s ongoing investigation and the possibility of charges looming, Red Line has continued to organize. Along with fundraising and preparing for any future legal fights, the group is supporting the Puyallup Tribe’s opposition to a liquefied natural gas export facility in Tacoma, Washington. And to the north, members are fundraising for the Unist’ot’en Camp, which is blocking multiple pipelines on unceded indigenous lands in British Columbia.

The climate for anti-pipeline organizing across the country could hardly be more threatening. McEachran’s third warrant was granted just after the Justice Department vowed to prosecute protesters who damage pipelines — and members of Congress and the American Petroleum Institute urged the agency to classify those activists as domestic terrorists.

This context informs Hildes’s suspicion that the reckless endangerment charges are a red herring. “The county prosecutor’s office now has the internal organizing records of a political group they don’t like,” Hildes told The Intercept. “This is not about a peaceful demonstration on the freeway anymore. This is about how do you intimidate and suppress dissent — that’s what it’s been about the whole time.”

]]>http://uproxx.com/news/justice-department-helped-target-facebook-anti-pipeline-activists/feed/0pipeline-grid-uproxx.jpguproxxinterceptAs New York City Declares War On The Oil Industry, The Politically Impossible Suddenly Seems Possiblehttp://uproxx.com/news/new-york-city-war-on-oil-industry/
http://uproxx.com/news/new-york-city-war-on-oil-industry/#commentsFri, 12 Jan 2018 20:32:41 +0000http://uproxx.com/?p=401039197

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Five years ago, when 350.org helped kick off the global fossil fuel divestment movement, one of the slogans the team came up with was “We > Fossil Fuels.”

The T-shirts and stickers were nice, but I have to admit that I never really felt it. Bigger than fossil fuels? With their bottomless budgets? Their endless capacity to blanket the airwaves and bankroll political parties? The slogan always made me kind of sad.

Well, yesterday in New York City, listening to Mayor Bill de Blasio announce that the city had just filed a lawsuit against five oil majors and intended to divest $5 billion from fossil fuel companies, I actually felt it. After being outgunned by the power and wealth of this industry for so many years, the balance of power seemed to physically tilt. It’s still not equal — not by a long shot — but something big changed nonetheless. Regular humans may not be more powerful than the fossil fuel companies now — but we might be soon.

Within minutes of de Blasio’s announcement going public, activists in London started tweeting at their mayor to step up in equally bold fashion. And while the press conference was still streaming live, several of us started to get emails from city councillors in other cities around the world, promising to initiate a similar process in their communities.

Such is the power of an action emanating from a center as symbolically important as New York City: What felt politically impossible yesterday suddenly seems possible, and the dominos start instantly falling.

It’s also extremely significant that the divestment and lawsuit were announced in tandem — because they have the potential to reinforce one another in a kind of virtuous market cycle. Part of the reason why fossil fuel divestment has picked up so much momentum over the past two years is that fossil fuel stocks have been performing badly. This is mainly because the price of oil has been depressed, but it is also because of market uncertainty created by the increasingly powerful climate and indigenous rights movements, and the signing of the Paris climate agreement.

All of this has raised the question of whether fossil fuel companies are really going to be able to get their pipelines and other infrastructure built, given the strength of the opposition. And they have also raised the question of whether these companies will be able dig up the huge oil, gas, and coal reserves that are currently factored into their stock prices — or are these are going to become stranded assets? Right now, we don’t know the answers to these questions, and that uncertainty can give many smart investors pause.

(The Trump administration, by ditching the Paris Agreement and opening up vast new swaths of territory for exploration, has been trying frantically to reassure the markets by sending the opposite message — that it’s back to dirty business as usual.)

Now, with New York City’s lawsuit for climate damages, the market is confronting the prospect of a cascade of similar legal actions — cities, towns, and countries all suing the industry for billions or even (combined) trillions of dollars in damages caused by sea-level rise and extreme weather events. The more suits that get filed, the more the market will have to factor in the possibility of fossil fuel companies having to pay out huge settlements in the near to medium term, much as the tobacco companies were forced to in past decades.

As that threat becomes more credible, with more players taking New York City’s lead, the investor case for dumping these stocks as overly high risk will be strengthened, thereby lending a potent new tool to the fossil fuel divestment movement. A virtuous cycle. Oh, and the more we are able to hit the industry in the pocketbook, the less likely costly new drilling and pipeline projects will be to go ahead, no matter how many precious national parks and pristine coastlines the Trump administration attempts to desecrate. If the economics don’t make sense, the drilling simply won’t advance.

That’s why New York’s actions are so significant, not just in New York or the United States, but globally. (It’s also why I got so cranky with the New York Times for treating it like a minor municipal event, buried on page 23.)

Yesterday was a big, good day for the planet – and we needed one of those.

Representatives from Energy Transfer Partners, the company behind the controversial Dakota Access pipeline, traveled to Cambridge, Iowa, in October to present a series of $20,000 checks to emergency management departments in six counties. The money was, in part, an acknowledgement of the months of anti-pipeline protests that had taxed local agencies during construction, but it was also a nod to the possibility of environmental contamination. One of the counties had pledged to use its check to purchase “HazMat operations and decontamination training/supplies.” Less than a month later, in Cambridge, the Iowa section of the Dakota Access pipeline would experience its first spill.

According to the standards of most state environmental agencies, it was a small spill that wouldn’t require much attention from emergency managers. On November 14, “excessive vibration” caused 21 gallons of crude to leak out of a crack in a weld connection at one of the pump stations, which are situated along pipelines to keep the product moving and monitor its flow. Since the leak was contained at the site, it went unreported to the Iowa Department of Natural Resources, although it did make it into a federal pipeline monitoring database.

The Dakota Access pipeline leaked at least five times in 2017. The biggest was a 168-gallon leak near DAPL’s endpoint in Patoka, Illinois, on April 23. According to federal regulators, no wildlife was impacted, although soil was contaminated, requiring remediation. DAPL went into operation on June 1, along with its under-the-radar sister project, the Energy Transfer Crude Oil pipeline, a natural gas pipeline converted to carry crude. Together, the two make up the Bakken pipeline system. ETCO leaked at least three times in 2017.

Most of the Bakken system leaks were considered minor by state and federal monitors. According to regulators, water was not impacted in any of the cases. The only spill considered “significant” by the federal Pipeline and Hazardous Materials Safety Administration, or PHMSA, was a 4,998-gallon leak on the ETCO pipeline in Dyersburg, Tennessee, on June 19. Tennessee Department of Environment and Conservation spokesperson Kim Schofinski told The Intercept that reporting the spill to the agency was not required because it was contained within the pumping station where it occurred.

The series of spills in the pipelines’ first months of operation underlines a fact that regulators and industry insiders know well: Pipelines leak.

To regulators like Bill Suess, who deals with a crude oil spill nearly every day as North Dakota’s spill investigation program manager, it’s the nature of the game. “A tanker truck rolls over and spills 7,000 gallons of crude oil, and nobody pays attention. Twenty gallons spill on DAPL, it makes world news, so it’s kind of funny,” he told The Intercept.

But Winona LaDuke, an Ojibwe environmental activist who was involved in the anti-DAPL protests, noted that “accumulation of the little things is pretty significant.” LaDuke is now pushing to stop construction of the Enbridge Line 3 oil sands pipeline in Minnesota. The Line 3 project’s environmental impact statement has underlined that damages to tribal natural and cultural resources along that pipeline’s pathway are “not quantifiable” and “cannot be mitigated.” “Somebody lives there,” LaDuke said. “Maybe that somebody who lives there is a little animal; maybe that somebody who lives there is a little plant. All of those are beings.”

Lisa Dillinger, a spokesperson for Energy Transfer Partners, told The Intercept, “All of these minor issues occurred within our easement at either valve sites or pump stations and did not go beyond our workspace.” She noted that four leaks occurred before the pipeline system went into service during a testing period and were contained on a protective liner, although PHMSA notes that those incidents involved soil contamination. Three leaks occurred at pump stations after the pipeline was fully operational and were isolated to a “concrete work area,” Dillinger said.

ETP has denied responsibility for a spill that occurred on March 3 on a feeder line that transports oil from the well where it’s extracted to the main Dakota Access Pipeline. The 84-gallon leak produced “a mist that settled on top of the snow” but penetrated to the ground in a 200-square-foot area, where contaminated soil and snow were removed by a vacuum truck. Caliber Midstream, the company behind the feeder line, did not respond to a request for comment.

“We understand there are varying opinions on infrastructure projects,” Dillinger told The Intercept, but pipelines are the “safest and most environmentally friendly way to transport the oil and gas products we use every day.”

Anne Rolfes, head of the Louisiana Bucket Brigade, which is fighting ETP’s proposed Bayou Bridge Pipeline, said the company’s argument about safety is unproven. “The company has an accident problem,” she said, adding that state agencies’ view of the spills as minor “just shows how problematic our so-called regulatory system is.”

Beyond the Bakken system, spills of clay-based drilling fluid on two of ETP’s newest projects have drawn attention before oil even entered the pipelines.

In Pennsylvania, construction of the Mariner East 2 pipeline, which is owned by Energy Transfer Partners via its subsidiary Sunoco, was shut down by regulators last Wednesday after Sunoco repeatedly drilled under waterways without permits. The 350-mile pipeline would carry ethane, butane, and propane from the Marcellus Shale fracking area to an export facility near Philadelphia. Suspension of construction “is necessary to correct the egregious and willful violations” by Sunoco, said the shutdown order issued by the Pennsylvania Department of Environmental Protection.

Pennsylvania regulators documented more than 100 spills of drilling fluid, ranging in size from 1 gallon to 160,000 gallons, entering creeks, lakes, wetlands, and fields since May. In at least two separate incidents, the fluid entered private wells, clouding drinking water and requiring locals to switch to Sunoco-provided bottled water.

According to Neil Shader, spokesperson for the Pennsylvania Department of Environmental Protection, lubricating drilling fluid is expected to leak when pipeline builders bore under streams. When a pipeline crosses a waterway, builders can either divert the water flow and build a big trench into which the pipeline is buried, or they can drill under the stream using a method called horizontal directional drilling. Both techniques can be environmentally disruptive, but they have distinct challenges — horizontal directional drilling, for example, requires gallons of so-called drilling mud, typically a mix of bentonite clay and water, to be pumped into the ground as the drilling takes place.

According to Shader, pressure causes the drilling fluid to look for pathways of escape, which is how leaks happen. Shader stressed that the fluid is required to be nontoxic, although, he added, “I’d imagine it doesn’t taste very good.”

Because of the risk, permits are required in advance of drilling. In Pennsylvania, Sunoco repeatedly failed to get permits before boring under tributaries to state-designated wild trout streams, which require special protection.

“Even though it’s nontoxic, there can still be environmental impacts,” Shader said of the drilling fluid. “A lot of the bugs and other macro-invertebrates that fish feed on thrive in a loose, gravelly stream bed. If you then cover that with mud, it covers up their habitat.”

The department demanded documentation of each instance Sunoco had installed a section of the Mariner East 2 pipeline under a wild trout stream and an explanation of the failures that led to permit violations, as well a plan as to how the company would conduct its construction moving forward. Additionally, the department has called for the company to address all alleged impacts to water wells in the Silver Spring Township, where wells were contaminated by unpermitted drilling, including restoration or replacement of the water supply and reimbursement for any costs.

“We are working with the DEP to resolve all issues connected with our environmental permits and look forward to promptly returning to work on this important pipeline project,” ETP spokesperson Dillinger told The Intercept. She added that construction of Mariner East 2 was 91 percent complete, and horizontal directional drilling was 62 percent finished.

Energy Transfer Partners is also behind the 700-mile natural gas pipeline Rover, which last spring spilled 2 million gallons of drilling mud into an Ohio wetland, which “coated the area with a layer of mud and impacted water quality.” Regulators found traces of diesel fuel in samples taken from the spill. Shader said that diesel contamination of drilling fluid is “incredibly unusual.” An analysis by Bloomberg in August found that Rover had “racked up more environmental violations than other major interstate natural gas pipelines built in the last two years.”

In November, Ohio’s attorney general sued ETP’s Rover Pipeline LLC for its environmental violations and unpermitted activity after the company refused to pay $2.3 million in fines. The Federal Energy Regulatory Commission forced the company to halt Rover construction for several months after the massive spill, although it was allowed to restart in September.

Elise Gerhart, whose family land in the pathway of Mariner East 2 is home to the anti-pipeline Camp White Pine, told The Intercept that she believes the ME2 project’s suspension was largely a product of community organizing along the pipeline. However, she’s skeptical that it will result in meaningful changes to Sunoco’s construction practices. “It seems like a false thing to me, like when Obama supposedly halted the Dakota Access pipeline.” In December 2016, the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers under President Barack Obama denied ETP a permit to drill underneath Lake Oahe, part of the Missouri River system, and ordered an environmental impact statement for the project. However, Donald Trump had already been elected to the presidency, and within his first days in office, he issued an order to expedite permitting. The pipeline was installed under the lake soon afterward.

Ultimately, it’s big accidents like the November 16 spill on TransCanada’s Keystone pipeline, when 210,000 gallons of crude spilled onto farmland in Amherst, South Dakota, that regulators and pipeline opponents worry most about. Keystone’s proposed sister project, the Keystone XL pipeline, launched the national anti-pipeline movement.

Since the November spill, massive truckloads of contaminated soil have been hauled away. According to a filing with the South Dakota Department of Environment and Natural Resources, groundwater was impacted 6 feet below the surface, although TransCanada reported that testing of two local drinking water wells showed contamination below Environmental Protection Agency safety levels. The pipeline restarted operations less than two weeks after the spill.

Ben Carson will soon deliver a major victory for civil rights activists on behalf of the Trump administration, implementing a new rule that will give more than 200,000 low-income families in 24 cities significantly improved access to housing in high-income neighborhoods.

Carson, however, has not suddenly become a champion of civil rights now that he is secretary of Housing and Urban Development. The rule was crafted by the Obama administration and a court ordered the Trump administration to enforce it.

The policy attempts to resolve a seeming defect in the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development’s housing voucher program: that vouchers are worth the same amount across an entire region. That means most voucher holders can’t afford to move into wealthier neighborhoods because their subsidy isn’t large enough to cover rent. Landlords in poor neighborhoods can, in turn, price gouge voucher holders, who have nowhere else to go. The new rule requires public housing authorities to alter the way they calculate rent subsidies, effectively making vouchers worth more in affluent areas and worth less in poorer communities.

At the time of filing, HUD had offered little explanation for suspending the rule. It abruptly made its announcement in an August letter to public housing authorities, and when The Intercept asked for further comment in October, HUD spokesperson Brian Sullivan said there had been “no change in policy.” He pointed to an August 25 blog post drafted by Acting General Deputy Assistant Secretary Todd Richardson, which said the decision was “informed by research” and that it would be beneficial to delay the rule’s implementation to allow for further study.

On December 1, HUD offered more detail. In court filings, the federal agency argued its actions fell under its broad discretionary power and therefore, were not subject to judicial review. HUD also released a previously undisclosed August 10 memo from Carson, outlining the agency’s rationale for the rule’s delay. Carson’s memorandum relied heavily on findings from an interim report, which found that of five areas selected to pilot the Small-Area Fair Market Rents, the total number of available units went down. HUD lawyers argued that these findings “fully and independently justif[y]” the suspension.

However, U.S. District Court Judge Beryl Howell disagreed. In her47-page decision, she granted the plaintiffs a preliminary injunction and outlined why HUD’s legal authority is more circumscribed than the agency purported. She also noted that the interim report upon which HUD was relying was based on five areas selected for criteria totally unrelated to the 24 metropolitan areas picked to be subjected to the rule. “This is really apples and oranges, isn’t it?” she asked Johnny Walker, a U.S attorney representing HUD in court.

Sasha Samberg-Champion, the attorney who argued on behalf of the plaintiffs at the December 19 hearing, told The Intercept that he and his colleagues were heartened and impressed by how well Howell understood the issues. “She was just phenomenally well-prepared, not only having read the parties’ briefing papers, but she also really dove into the documents presented,” he said. “I think HUD was just not prepared to answer questions at the level of specificity that she was asking.”

For example, when Howell asked HUD’s counsel if any of the 24 metropolitan areas had “formally, or even informally” requested that the federal government suspend its implementation of the Small Area Fair Market Rents rule, both Walker and HUD’s trial attorney David Sahli said they weren’t sure. Sahli eventually admitted that to his knowledge, no such request had been made. This was notable, because the final rule indicated that a suspension could occur at the request of a public housing authority.

One of the plaintiffs’ main arguments was that HUD violated the Administrative Procedure Act, an important federal statute that imposes specific limitations on the process of agency rule-making, including a requirement that agencies collect and respond to public comments. “HUD’s main argument was that there’s a regulatory provision that gives the secretary carte blanche to suspend the rule at any time for any reason, and the judge clearly was skeptical of that,” said Samberg-Champion.

Perhaps foreseeing Howell’s skepticism, HUD announced in early December that it would open up a 30-day period to solicit public comment about suspending the Small-Area Fair Market Rents rule. That 30 days began December 11.

HUD claimed that by opening up a month for public comment, it had rendered the plaintiffs’ procedural claims moot. “This argument is meritless,” wrote the plaintiffs ina reply brief filed in December. “If anything, HUD’s belated notice simply confirms the illegality of its suspension.”

“Procedurally, this is totally irrelevant because the Administrative Procedure Act doesn’t allow you to solicit comments belatedly,” explained Samberg-Champion. “But for whatever reason, atmospherically, HUD felt they needed to do this.”

It’s not clear whether HUD will appeal Howell’s decision. Sullivan, the HUD spokesperson, did not return The Intercept’s request for comment.

“I’m not going to make any predictions about what HUD will or won’t do, but I hope they will now carry out the laws they’re supposed to,” said Samberg-Champion. “They have the right to appeal should they choose, but I hope they don’t do that. All they’d be doing is frankly stalling, and they would lose that as well.”

Ajmel Quereshi, a senior counsel with the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund, another civil rights group participating in the lawsuit, told The Intercept that at a minimum, HUD has an obligation to “immediately begin working” with local housing agencies to implement the rule, so the new payment standards can take effect as soon as possible.

“We expect they’ll comply with the court order,” he said, “and we look forward to working with HUD to see positive results for thousands of families.”

In her first comments to the press, former Green Party presidential candidate Jill Stein said she will cooperate fully with the Senate Intelligence Committee’s investigation into “collusion with the Russians” during the 2016 campaign, and is currently searching for relevant documents. Stein denies holding any substantive communications with the Russian government or RT, its state-owned media property.

Stein says her involvement in the inquiry, first reported by BuzzFeed News, came as a surprise when they were first contacted last month. After a subsequent dialogue between attorneys representing Stein and lawyers from the Senate Intelligence Committee, the ex-candidate received a formal request for cooperation. Although she says the possibility of testifying before Congress has not yet been broached, Stein says she would be “happy to do so” if asked.

Still, Stein clearly resents the Senate’s attention vis a vis electoral interference and foreign meddling: “This smacks of the dangerous underbelly of these investigations. The extent to which they exercise overreach, politicizing, and sensationalism is a danger to democracy, especially in the current climate of all-out war on our First Amendment rights. This is not a time to be attacking the rights of political speech and political association.”

In the meantime, Stein’s defunct 2016 campaign is working to “produce all docs related to the inquiry into Russian interference” in accordance with the Intelligence Committee’s formal request, though she doesn’t “believe they’ve given us search terms,” as their respective attorneys are still “in the process of working that out.” Stein added that she’s unaware of a deadline for this document handover, but “we are trying to comply as quickly as we possibly can…there are a number of people we have to contact that we’re not in touch with, and they have to search as well.”

It’s safe to assume the Intelligence Committee is interested in anything pertaining to Stein’s now-infamous attendance at a Gala for RT in Moscow, at which she was seated and photographed with Vladimir Putin and Michael Flynn. Stein told The Intercept that as she has routinely appeared on RT, and she expects to hand over communications related to booking those TV segments and other “administrative” messages between her campaign and the Russian network, as well as “logistical” messages about the Moscow event. Stein also noted that before her Moscow visit she had “requested to speak with either Putin or [Russian foreign minister Sergey] Lavrov, or someone in the Russian government, to be able to discuss our policies, because I was there to advance our agenda for peace and climate action and diplomacy and nuclear weapon abolition.”

Stein says this request was not granted. As well, Stein maintains that she declined to let RT pay for any portion of her trip to Moscow, and further denies requesting or receiving any other assistance, monetary or otherwise, from RT, the Russian government, Wikileaks, or the Trump campaign, adding that any dialogue or cooperation with Trump “would have been quite contrary to our values.”

When asked why she had attended the gala and sought an audience with Putin, she told The Intercept that “we sought contact with every powerful world leader we had access to,” and that the Russian government was of particular interest because of its involvement in the Syrian Civil War. “We don’t have any reason to suspect that there was any backdoor communication,” Stein said. “We were very much focused on the substantive issues of the elections, and we avoid like the plague manipulations and machinations in order to make things happen behind the scenes.”

A spokesperson for Stein provided the following statement:

Responding to a Senate Select Committee on Intelligence request for documents pertaining to interference in the 2016 election, former Green Party Presidential candidate Jill Stein said she is cooperating by sharing all communications relevant to the committee’s mission. “We take seriously the issue of potential interference in our elections, as demonstrated by our continuing efforts to investigate the integrity of the 2016 election and examine our voting machines that are widely known to be vulnerable, but which still have not been examined for evidence of interference. To restore trust in our elections and democracy itself, we must safeguard our elections from all potential sources of interference, whether by foreign state actors or domestic political partisans, criminal networks, lone wolves, or private corporations – including those who control voting software.”

“Our campaign has observed the highest standards of transparency and integrity in our interactions with foreign nationals as well as Americans. Our communications with Russian individuals regarding an invitation to speak on international relations at the RT 10th anniversary media conference will confirm what we stated publicly at that time and since: that we did not accept any payment or even reimbursement for the trip, and that we made the trip with the goal of reaching an international audience and Russian officials with a message of Middle East peace, diplomacy, and cooperation against the urgent threat of climate change, consistent with long-standing Green principles and policies.”

“We strongly support legitimate inquiry into any illegal activity in our elections – including quid pro quo deals, money laundering, corruption and violation of campaign finance laws. At the same time, we caution against the politicization, sensationalism and collapse of journalistic standards that has plagued media coverage of the investigation. In the current climate of attacks on our civil liberties, with the emergence of censorship in social media and the press, criminalization of protest, militarization of police and massive expansion of the surveillance state, we must guard against the potential for these investigations to be used to intimidate and silence principled opposition to the political establishment.”

Stein said that she would release a more comprehensive statement about the investigation in the near future.

But business executives say the bill will drive them to invest in automation, the type that will allow them to cut jobs in the future.

The issue at hand is a provision of the bill that allows full and immediate depreciation of capital spending. This change will allow most capital expenditures, such as investments in machines and building upgrades, to be written off against profits in the first year.

The change, set to last for five years, is far more generous to corporations than current law, which allows businesses to write off the costs of new equipment gradually over years.

While the provision is expected to provide substantial benefit to the commercial real estate and oil industry, the provision could also spur a wave of investment in automation in the manufacturing industry.

Firms that supply automated machines and other assembly line robots, including Rockwell Automation Inc and Emerson Electric Co, have in recent weeks celebrated the tax reform provision, expecting increased revenue as clients order more products.

John Stroup, the chief executive of Belden, discussed the capital expenditure provision with J.P. Morgan vice president Ashwin Kesireddy earlier this month during an investor meeting.

“I would expect there to be an acceleration of capital investment in certain categories if, in fact, the tax plan is passed with the provisions you just mentioned,” said Stroup. “There’s already a number of factors why people are investing in automation as an example. This would just be another one where they could expense the investment and get the added benefit of the tax shield, which is substantial,” he added.

A similar exchange occurred on the last call with investors hosted by Emerson Electric, which produces robots and parts used on the factory floor, including machines used for automotive manufacturing. David Farr, the chief executive of the company, said he expects increased orders from his company’s automation department if the tax bill passes with beneficial provisions on capital expenditures.

The instant capital expenditure provision has been long sought and championed by the manufacturing industry.

Rick Schreiber, head of BDO USA, an accounting and consulting company, and a board member to the National Association of Manufacturers, explained recently how tax reform will shape the future of manufacturing.

“This is not the gloom and doom of jobs going away,” Schreiber told U.S. News and World Report. “It’s getting rid of all those unskilled, carpal-tunnel-inducing, heavy-lifting-type jobs. You can now have a co-bot — a robot that collaborates with a human to do all those mundane tasks or all that heavy lifting or reduce workers’ compensation-type claims and costs.”

Many others on Wall Street are expecting similar moves.

Eric Marshall, a portfolio manager with Hodges Capital, told FOX Business that one of the first moves by corporate executives will be to invest in technology and automation at the expense of hiring new workers. “It’s going to be disruptive but it can be a positive and a negative,” said Marshall.

Stocks for companies that specialize in selling automation systems and other assembly-line technology have soared in response to rising prospects for the tax bill.

President Donald Trump, meanwhile, has sold his tax reform effort as a job plan. “Our plan can be simplified in three simple words: jobs, jobs, jobs,” the president said while rallying support for the legislation at the White House.

Dothan, Alabama — The day after Doug Jones won the Democratic nomination for Senate, Dr. Joe Reed sat down to share his thoughts on the race with The Intercept. Reed, head of the Alabama Democratic Conference, is largely seen as the de facto leader of the Alabama Democratic Party, as most of the state executive committee is either an ally or member of the ADC.

He is, in many ways, the last true black party boss in the South. But the way Reed sees it, if a Democrat like Jones wants to win the Alabama Senate seat, he can’t rely on black votes, he has to do his own work in the white areas.

“He’s gonna have to campaign in white folks’ districts himself,” Reed said. As if on cue, his flip phone rang.

It was Doug Jones, calling to pay his respects.

“Now whatcha gotta do now,” he lectured Jones, “is get out on the road and tell Bubba and Cooter how important the Democratic Party is for them.”

He rattled off the names of long-dead Democratic congressmen and their accomplishments. “If he’s from around Huntsville, he oughta thank John Sparkman every day. If he got a student loan, he oughta thank Carl Elliott,” Reed said. “So go tell ’em what the Democratic Party has meant to them and meant to their parents.”

While Reed was comfortable delegating the white vote to Jones, he didn’t leave anything to chance on his end. Reed’s job was eased by Roy Moore, the Republican nominee, who toward the end of the campaign waxed poetically about the halcyon days of slavery, comments that got little attention at the time but began going viral last week. Asked by an African American voter when he thought America was last “great,” he reached for the years before the Civil War. “I think it was great at the time when families were united — even though we had slavery — they cared for one another,” he said. “Our families were strong, our country had a direction.”

Precisely whose families were strong, and which were sold in pieces, was left unsaid, but it resonated nonetheless. Black activists in Alabama expected increased turnout in the Senate special election, in part due to those remarks. And they got it: Late Tuesday night, the Associated Press called the race for Jones, who won largely on the strength of black turnout.

“Roy Moore said the only time America was great was back when slavery existed, and we don’t want nothing to do with that dude,” said Rev. Kenneth Glasgow, an activist in Dothan. “That dude trying to make us slaves.”

Glasgow led a county-wide canvassing effort here in Houston County for Reed’s Alabama Democratic Conference, the largest Democratic and black organization in Alabama. Old school tactics are being deployed to try to repair the turnout machine that was broken by the Republican waves of the early 2000s.

Tuesday afternoon, Glasgow and his friend Edward Jones set up grills outside polling stations. Buses, minivans, and taxicabs started taking people to the polls. In rural Escambia County, likewise, a Monday night fish fry served as an informal local gathering and a get-out-the-vote rally.

Under the leadership of Reed and party chair Nancy Worley, the ADC and the Alabama Democratic Party have largely focused their efforts on preserving their seats in the cities and the Black Belt around Montgomery, much to the chagrin of some rank and file (mostly white) Democrats, like Rep. Craig Ford, D-Gadsden, who complains that Joe Reed “killed” the party.

Reed, on Election Day, was unapologetic. “I can’t get white folks to vote Democrat. White folk gots to do that,” he said, exasperated. “It’s much easier for whites to go out and embrace white Republicans; they go to church together, they go to school together, they go to sororities and fraternities together, they do all that stuff together. So it’s much easier than to pick up the flag and say I’m gonna be a Democrat.”

The ADC said that it was hoping for 50 percent turnout among the black community in Alabama; an improbable number but a sign of confidence from an organization that has seen setbacks in recent years. With the exception of President Barack Obama’s campaigns in 2008 and 2012, the black vote has seen a steep decline in Alabama since the early 2000s.

It is an unavoidable reality that black enthusiasm has waned, says Dr. Earl Jones, the head of ADC’s efforts in southeastern Alabama, and Glasgow’s mentor.

“I consider it to be a function of learned helplessness on the part of black and poor people, particularly in Alabama and in rural areas,” Jones explains. “Their sons and daughters are being arrested. Look at the city jails, the county jails, the state jails, you see they’re filled with people of color. … And that learned helplessness evolved out of that. In other words, they said it’s not going to make any difference anyway regardless to how I vote. And they’ve seen that in various ways, I would say.”

The Democratic nominee, Doug Jones, needed black voters to come out in higher numbers than they have in the past. Bob Vance nearly beat Judge Roy Moore in 2012 when he last ran for chief justice of the state’s Supreme Court, but even then it was only with the massive turnout inspired by Obama’s re-election campaign.

Nationally, of course, the conversation centered on Moore’s penchant for molesting children as a prosecutor in his 30s. An exit poll found that 54 percent of voters said the allegations did not influence their vote, but, presumably, that number included many voters who had long ago made up their mind they would not vote for Moore, who has been twice removed from the bench.

But those who dismissed the allegations relied on a few mental exercises. Some blamed the “fake news media” for concocting them from whole cloth, while others claimed the women had been paid by George Soros to make the charges.

It is harder, though, to explain away Moore’s own words. When asked by Sean Hannity if he ever remembered dating teenagers as a 30-something when he was deputy district attorney, he said, “I don’t remember ever dating any girl without the permission of her mother.”

When asked how he met his wife, he described seeing her perform at a ballet recital as a young girl. With no children of his own with him, Moore stood at the back of the auditorium and watched the girls dance, he said.

“When I was deputy district attorney, many years before we got married, I saw her at a dance recital. I was standing in the back of the auditorium and I saw her up front, and I remembered her name, Kayla Kaiser — K.K. — I remembered that. I didn’t meet her, I left, and it was, gosh, eight years later, I met her.”

Moore told her he thought he knew her. “She thought I was coming on and making it up, then I told her, and she identified the dance,” he said.

When Matt Lauer was fired from the “Today” show after allegations of sexual misconduct, news reports alleged that his lawyers were working on a plan to get the disgraced host a $30 million payout from NBC — the remainder of his $20 million a year salary up until the end of 2018. For a vastly wealthy serial harasser to believe he is owed tens of millions more dollars seemed a galling manifestation of the very entitlement underpinning the predatory behavior for which he was fired.

With powerful men in the media and elsewhere being dethroned amid abuse allegations, payouts to predators frequently follow suit, playing a major role in the current public reckoning with patriarchal power. But receiving or, in Lauer’s case, seeking a massive payout also speaks to a vastly under-discussed facet of the wave of sexual abuse allegations: A light is being shed on the role of entitled wealth, as well as toxic masculinity, in producing a dangerous imbalance of power.

All too often, the vagaries of employment law and corporate culture are pitted against efforts to seek justice for victims and consequences for perpetrators. Fox News paid out sexual harassers Bill O’Reilly and late chair Roger Ailes around $25 million and $40 million, respectively.

Payouts and rewards like these, however, are a consistent part of modern American corporate life, found not only among the media or on issues of sexual harassment. Consider the rewards heaped on Wall Street executives following a financial crisis for which they bear substantial blame. In 2008, banks used taxpayer bailout money to pay top executives $1.6 billion in salaries, bonuses, and various benefits like stock options and the use of company jets.

“This is the Wall Street concept of ‘fuck you money’,” Alexis Goldstein, senior policy analyst for Americans for Financial Reform, told me. “When you’re so rich, you can walk around and do whatever you want without fear of repercussions; this is exactly the sort of power some people chase, as something to aspire to.” Goldstein noted that President Donald Trump is the example-in-chief: a man of vast wealth whose vile actions were rewarded with a presidency.

It was a relief, then, to learn that Lauer will not receive a payout. A senior NBC source told CNN that the host “will not be paid past his last day of work.” But we should be careful before considering this a sea-change. NBC’s response to Lauer is not a challenge to toxic male entitlement, but an explicit refusal to reckon with historic institutional complicity — two problems which must be faced together if we are to take on patriarchal oppression and sexual violence.

In comparison to Fox News, NBC seemed to claim the moral high ground in refusing to reward a powerful predator with further millions. But to deny the payout, the network must rely on a legal rationale in which they claim previous ignorance to Lauer’s years of misconduct.

NBC News reported that the reason Lauer will receive no settlement is that he was fired “for cause,” thus nullifying the network’s obligation to pay him through the end of his contract. This complicates the idea that NBC’s decision is primarily a moral one. In order for the former host to be fired “for cause,” NBC must maintain that his misconduct was unknown to the company, at least when it negotiated the contract.

“If they already knew about it and tolerated it,” explained Samuel Estreicher, professor of law at New York University and director of its Center for Labor and Employment Law, “it takes away from the cause concept as a justification for withholding compensation owed, as opposed to simply firing the person.” An employee generally cannot be denied compensation for services rendered based on behavior that, up until that point, the company has known about and permitted or countenanced.

So while rewarding Lauer a $30 million payout would be unjust indeed, NBC’s ability to deny the payout is predicated on the company’s claim to ignorance regarding his years of predatory and harassing behavior. The network claims that, before receiving the detailed complaint that led to Lauer’s firing, they had found no evidence and received no other complaints of the host’s wrongdoing.

Several women, however, told Variety that their complaints about Lauer to executives “fell on deaf ears,” with one former reporter alleging that executives had “protected the shit out of Matt Lauer.” The idea that NBC management knew nothing until last week buoys a “bad apple” narrative when a structural one is needed.

It’s a double-edged sword. When a predator like O’Reilly is paid out, his misconduct is seemingly rewarded; when a settlement is denied in a case like Lauer’s, the network evades responsibility as a point of law. In either case, it’s important to remember that the only reason these men would be potentially entitled to such vasts payouts is because they were paid so much in the first place.

The average anchor salary at NBC is around $67,500 and Lauer was earning $28 million. With the gender pay gap persisting across the media, injustice is already written into the DNA of the corporation and the industry. Whatever NBC executives did in fact know about Lauer’s history of predation, there’s little doubt that his position as a lucrative but large investment for the company played a role in enabling his behavior, or at least letting it be overlooked for years. Only very few top executives and talent, for example, have offices fitted with buttons under their desks to close and lock their doors from the inside — a mechanism Lauer used to harass without fear of interruption.

Lauer’s desk button took on the air of a Bond villain detail, but such “panic buttons” are not that unusual — at least not among people who make tens of millions of dollars. As a New York-based mechanical engineer told Architectural Digest, “In a high-end office for, say, a bank like JPMorgan, or for the high-end executives in other industries, it’s not crazy to have the ability to lock the door from your desk,” he noted, citing the potential for a violent attack. It might not be a button with perverted designs, but it is nonetheless symbolic of vast power imbalance — of who gets protected and who does not.

With the so-called #MeToo moment orbiting largely around the rich and powerful, the putative solution of elevating more women to high-power positions has been highlighted as a redress. “We already know how to reduce sexual harassment at work, and the answer is actually pretty simple: Hire and promote more women,” wrote Frank Dobbin and Alexandra Kalev in the introduction to their Harvard Business Review study, which showed how sexual harassment “flourishes in workplaces where men dominate in management and women have little power.” There have already been calls for Lauer’s replacement on “Today” to be a woman or women. But by elevating women to high-power positions with “fuck you” money, we only address one aspect of toxic entitlement.

Lauer’s career may be over, but until we do away with “fuck you” money altogether — by which I mean extreme wealth inequality — toxic entitlement with which the Weinsteins and O’Reillys of the world have acted will remain a scourge against which we struggle, rather than a thing of the past. The problem is not a byproduct of power imbalances but an operation of them. The corporate executives now promising structural change around sexual harassment might be willing to fire predators and implement better policies, but they’re not going to challenge a system that provides them with their “fuck you” money, too.

]]>http://uproxx.com/news/income-inequality-drives-sexual-abuse-workplace/feed/2working-grid-uproxx.jpguproxxinterceptBehind Closed Doors, The U.S. Military Said Sgt. La David Johnson Survived The Initial Ambush In Nigerhttp://uproxx.com/news/us-military-said-sgt-la-david-johnson-survived-initial-niger-ambush/
http://uproxx.com/news/us-military-said-sgt-la-david-johnson-survived-initial-niger-ambush/#commentsMon, 11 Dec 2017 20:48:13 +0000http://uproxx.com/?p=400985789

Shutterstock / U.S. Army

What did officials at U.S. Africa Command know about the fate of Sgt. La David Johnson, and when did they know it?

On October 4, U.S. Special Forces soldiers, operating alongside local troops, were ambushed by Islamist militants in the West African nation of Niger. The next day, AFRICOM announced that three Americans had been killed. But the day after that, AFRICOM unexpectedly updated the toll: a fourth U.S. soldier, Sgt. La David Johnson, had also been slain.

Despite an enormous amount of attention on the killings – not least because President Donald Trump was accused of offending Johnson’s widow when he phoned her to offer his condolences – the Pentagon has refused to officially say what happened to Johnson. Reporting by the Washington Post, among others, based on unnamed military sources, indicated that the Pentagon had immediately dispatched a team of elite commandos to search for him. The Post also reported in November that Johnson was likely taken prisoner, bound, and murdered. But AFRICOM has consistently refused to confirm whether Johnson survived the initial ambush.

Reporting by The Intercept reveals, however, that the day after Johnson was separated from his Special Forces Unit, officials at the headquarters of Africa Command apparently said he was alive. A closed-door conversation at AFRICOM, heard by this reporter over an open phone line, adds this new detail to the Pentagon’s murky timeline of events surrounding the deaths of the four soldiers.

On October 5, I made scores of calls to AFRICOM’s media relations office in Stuttgart, Germany, which is where the command’s headquarters are located. Most went unanswered or resulted in me being hung up on (a response that reflects AFRICOM’s dissatisfaction with my reporting). In one instance, however, AFRICOM personnel did not properly disconnect the call, apparently placing it on speakerphone. As a result, for roughly one hour, conversations inside the press office – from mundane exchanges to screaming outbursts — were broadcast over the open phone line.

The conversations I heard confirmed that the military said Johnson was alive the day after the attack. The candid discussions revealed that the command apparently entered into embargo agreements with several journalists to withhold news about Johnson being alive while military operations to rescue him were underway. Such embargoes are not unusual and are sensible when reporting on an ongoing military operation could jeopardize the lives of people involved in it.

The conversations included AFRICOM spokespeople Lt. Cmdr. Anthony Falvo, Robyn Mack, and Col. Mark Cheadle, who is AFRICOM’s chief of public affairs and communication synchronization. A voice that was likely Cheadle said, “We’ve been able to talk a few off the ledge, but it’s gonna break. … By talking about it all you do is put this young man’s life, and those who are trying to help him, in further danger.”

Cheadle’s mention of talking “a few off the ledge” appears to reference journalists who were considering reporting on Johnson. His reference to putting “this young man’s life … in further danger” likely referred to the consequences of reporting that Johnson was thought to be alive and being searched for.

Also mentioned were the names of a number of journalists, including CNN’s Barbara Starr. On October 6, when news of Johnson’s death was released, Starr co-wrote a story in which she noted that her network “did not report the details of the search operation while it was ongoing and did not report the deceased service member’s recovery until CNN was assured that his family was notified.” Her story, in what until now has been one of the clearest signs that the military believed Johnson survived the initial attack, also stated that “the U.S. military said it does not believe Johnson ever fell into enemy hands, but had reason to believe he might be alive. Military officials launched an urgent search-and-rescue mission after receiving electronic signals that indicated Johnson might be alive in the field.”

Officials at AFRICOM’s Stuttgart headquarters ignored multiple requests for comment during the reporting of this article. But Pentagon spokesperson Maj. Audricia Harris said “initial findings did not show evidence Sgt. Johnson was ever in hostile hands” and cautioned against reporting on the incident until an official investigation is complete. “Those reports [on Sgt. Johnson being captured alive] are speculation,” she told The Intercept. “That’s why we have an investigation to collect the facts. So, until that’s complete, everything that you read is conjecture and speculation.”

The military and the FBI are conducting investigations into the deaths of Johnson and Staff Sgts. Bryan C. Black, Jeremiah W. Johnson, and Dustin M. Wright, all of whom were assigned to the 3rd Special Forces Group. The military investigation, headed by Maj. Gen. Roger Cloutier Jr., is not expected to be completed until next year. “Investigations can go as long as they need to get it right,” Harris said.

The U.S. military’s statements about the attack have changed over time, and even the nature of the mission remains unclear. The day after the attack, AFRICOM said the U.S. soldiers were providing “advice and assistance” to Nigerien troops. A day later, on October 6, the Pentagon called it a “reconnaissance patrol” as part of a broader “train, advise, and assist” mission. Later media reports indicated the mission may have actually been a kill or capture operation aimed at a high-value target.

Several weeks after the attack, Gen. Joseph Dunford, chair of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, held a press conference at which he refused to definitively say whether the military believed or knew that Johnson had survived the initial attack. “Three U.S. soldiers who were KIA were evacuated on the evening of 4 October. And at that time … Sgt. La David Johnson was still missing,” Dunford said. “On the evening of 6th October, Sgt. Johnson’s body was found and subsequently evacuated.”

Unnamed military and intelligence officials have been quoted by news organizations as saying it was unlikely that Johnson was captured and executed by militants. Some of those news organizations indicated the military initially believed that Johnson had been alive following the ambush. The overheard conversation at AFRICOM headquarters appears to offer clear evidence that the military was operating under the belief that Johnson had survived the initial attack.

The White House has also withheld information on the subject. “I actually know a lot more than I’m letting on, but I’m not going to tell you,” Chief of Staff John Kelly said on Oct. 19, when asked whether electronic signals indicated Johnson may have been alive in the period following the attack.

In the past, AFRICOM has taken steps to withhold information and keep quiet embarrassing incidents and untoward activities by U.S. military personnel in Africa — from drink- and drug-fueled deaths and the shooting of an officer by an enlisted man, to soliciting prostitutes and sex crimes. The alleged killing in Mali of a Green Beret by Navy SEALs earlier this year, reportedly in connection to a shadowy money-skimming scheme, remained under wraps for months. The results of an inquiry into the torture and deaths of prisoners at a Cameroonian base frequented by American personnel, exposed by The Intercept this summer, have yet to be released.

Experts say that such inquiries are important, but more fundamental issues loom larger. “The attention to the Niger mission in which four U.S. troops died is welcome, but it will only make a difference if it moves beyond tactical questions to the issue of what the U.S. military role in Africa is and should be,” said William Hartung, director of the Arms and Security Project at the Center for International Policy. “The expansion of U.S. operations on the continent is long overdue for congressional scrutiny.”

Progressive radio and television personality Sam Seder will be offered his MSNBC contributor job back and plans to accept, according to multiple MSNBC sources.

Seder and MSNBC were set to part ways when his contributor contract expired next year, with reports indicating the departure had to do with a 2009 tweet from Seder surfaced by the far-right provocateur Mike Cernovich. After initially caving in to right-wing internet outrage over the tweet, MSNBC reversed its decision to not renew Seder’s contract.

“I appreciate MSNBC’s thoughtful reconsideration and willingness to understand the cynical motives of those who intentionally misrepresented my tweet for their own toxic, political purposes,” Seder said in a statement to The Intercept. “We are experiencing an important and long overdue moment of empowerment for the victims of sexual assault and of reckoning for their perpetrators. I’m proud that MSNBC and its staff have set a clear example of the need to get it right.”

Cernovich is a right-wing provocateur and conspiracy theorist who works in hand-in-glove with white supremacists. Cernovich dug up a 2009 tweet from Seder and claimed it endorsed rape. The tweet was meant as a satirical criticism of accused rapist Roman Polanski’s liberal defenders, but MSNBC took Cernovich’s bad-faith reading at face value and fired Seder.

“Sometimes you just get one wrong — and that’s what happened here.”

“Sometimes you just get one wrong,” said MSNBC president Phil Griffin in a statement to The Intercept, “and that’s what happened here. We made our initial decision for the right reasons — because we don’t consider rape to be a funny topic to be joked about. But we’ve heard the feedback, and we understand the point Sam was trying to make in that tweet was actually in line with our values, even though the language was not. Sam will be welcome on our air going forward.”

The Intercept reached out to Cernovich for comment, but he had not replied by press time.

Seder’s two-day-long saga echoes another incident almost as old as Seder’s Polanski tweet.

In 2010, the Obama administration moved swiftly to fire Department of Agriculture employee Shirley Sherrod after right-wing provocateur Andrew Breitbart posted video of a speech she made to the NAACP. But the administration hadn’t waited to see the full speech: The out-of-context clips posted by Breitbart appeared to show so-called reverse racism; in context, Sherrod’s speech was about growth and compassion.

It was initially a major victory for Breitbart, but the outcome paradoxically defanged his future work against liberals. Obama administration officials felt punked after they learned the full context of Sherrod’s remarks and would never cave so quickly to right-wing activists again. Sherrod, after the full video emerged, was offered her job back, but declined.

As with Sherrod, MSNBC’s reversal on Seder could mark a turning point. Cernovich, fresh off his momentary victory, announced he was now rummaging through the old twitter feeds of other liberal personalities, hoping to land them in the unemployment line, too. But MSNBC’s decision sends a signal that the news channel recognized it caved too quickly and shouldn’t let Nazi-adjacent online activists call the shots at a major network. After facing public humiliation for misreading the tweet, they and other outlets will be less likely collapse under pressure so quickly the next time a journalist has an old tweet surfaced.

Institutions respond to both incentives and pain, and MSNBC clearly thought the most pain-free approach was to cut ties with Seder and move on. But the move brought tremendous fury down upon them from their own viewers and employees, both rank-and-file and on-air talent. Host Chris Hayes publicly supported Seder and broke with the network over the decision, while numerous employees gave brutal blind quotes to media reporters. This reporter, a former MSNBC contributor, started an online petition which had collected more than 11,000 signatures as of Wednesday evening. As the story was picked up outside of the media and liberal press, MSNBC must have realized it had a bigger problem on its hands.

The Trump administration is considering a set of proposals developed by Blackwater founder Erik Prince and a retired CIA officer — with assistance from Oliver North, a key figure in the Iran-Contra scandal — to provide CIA Director Mike Pompeo and the White House with a global, private spy network that would circumvent official U.S. intelligence agencies, according to several current and former U.S. intelligence officials and others familiar with the proposals. The sources say the plans have been pitched to the White House as a means of countering “deep state” enemies in the intelligence community seeking to undermine Trump’s presidency.

The creation of such a program raises the possibility that the effort would be used to create an intelligence apparatus to justify the Trump administration’s political agenda.

“Pompeo can’t trust the CIA bureaucracy, so we need to create this thing that reports just directly to him,” said a former senior U.S. intelligence official with firsthand knowledge of the proposals, in describing White House discussions. “It is a direct-action arm, totally off the books,” this person said, meaning the intelligence collected would not be shared with the rest of the CIA or the larger intelligence community. “The whole point is this is supposed to report to the president and Pompeo directly.”

Oliver North, who appears frequently on Trump’s favorite TV network, Fox News, was enlisted to help sell the effort to the administration. He was the “ideological leader” brought in to lend credibility, said the former senior intelligence official.

Some of the individuals involved with the proposals secretly met with major Trump donors asking them to help finance operations before any official contracts were signed.

The proposals would utilize an army of spies with no official cover in several countries deemed “denied areas” for current American intelligence personnel, including North Korea and Iran. The White House has also considered creating a new global rendition unit meant to capture terrorist suspects around the world, as well as a propaganda campaign in the Middle East and Europe to combat Islamic extremism and Iran.

“I can find no evidence that this ever came to the attention of anyone at the NSC or [White House] at all,” wrote Michael N. Anton, a spokesperson for the National Security Council, in an email. “The White House does not and would not support such a proposal.” But a current U.S. intelligence official appeared to contradict that assertion, stating that the various proposals were first pitched at the White House before being delivered to the CIA. The Intercept reached out to several senior officials that sources said had been briefed on the plans by Prince, including vice president Mike Pence. His spokesperson wrote there was “no record of [Prince] ever having met with or briefed the VP.” Oliver North did not respond to a request for comment.

According to two former senior intelligence officials, Pompeo has embraced the plan and has lobbied the White House to approve the contract. Asked for comment, a CIA spokesperson said, “You have been provided wildly inaccurate information by people peddling an agenda.”

At the heart of the scheme being considered by the White House are Blackwater founder Erik Prince and his longtime associate, CIA veteran John R. Maguire, who currently works for the intelligence contractor Amyntor Group. Maguire also served on Trump’s transition team. Amyntor’s role was first reported by Buzzfeed News.

Prince and Maguire deny they are working together. Those assertions, however, are challenged by current and former U.S. officials and by Trump donors who say the two men were collaborating.

As with many arrangements in the world of CIA contracting and clandestine operations, details of who is in charge of various proposals are murky by design and change depending on which players are speaking. An Amyntor official said Prince was not “formally linked to any contract proposal by Amyntor.” In an email, Prince rejected the suggestion that he was involved with the proposals. When asked if he has knowledge of this project, Prince replied: “I was/am not part of any of those alleged efforts.”

The former senior intelligence official with direct knowledge of the efforts scoffed at Prince’s denials. “Erik’s proposal had no company names on the slides,” this person said, “but there is no doubt that Prince and Maguire were working together.”

Prince and Maguire have a long professional relationship. Maguire recently completed a stint as a consultant with Prince’s company, Frontier Services Group, a Hong Kong-based security and logistics company partially owned by the Chinese government. FSG has no known connections to the private spy plan.

Prince has strong ties to the Trump administration: His sister Betsy DeVos is secretary of education, he was a major donor to the Trump election campaign, and he advised the transition team on intelligence and defense appointments, as The Intercept has previously reported. Prince has also contributed to Vice President Mike Pence’s campaigns.

Maguire spent more than two decades as a paramilitary officer at the CIA, including tours in Central America working with the Contras. He has extensive experience in the Middle East, where he helped plan the 2003 invasion of Iraq.

Maguire and Prince met together in September with a senior CIA official at a Virginia restaurant to discuss privatizing the war in Afghanistan.

Prince told a top fundraiser that Maguire was working on part of his Afghanistan plan, characterizing it as the first part of a multi-pronged program. The fundraiser added that Prince never directly asked him for money. But sources close to the project say Maguire did seek private funding for Amyntor’s efforts until a CIA contract materialized. “They’ve been going around asking for a bridge loan to float their operations until the CIA says yes,” said a person who has been briefed on the fundraising efforts.

Beginning last spring and into the summer, Maguire and a group of Amyntor representatives began asking Trump donors to support their intelligence efforts in Afghanistan, the initial piece of what they hoped would be a broader program. Some Trump fundraisers were asked to provide introductions to companies and wealthy clients who would then hire Amyntor for economic intelligence contracts. Maguire explained that some of the profit from those business deals would fund their foreign intelligence collection. Others were asked to give money outright.

“[Maguire] said there were people inside the CIA who joined in the previous eight years [under Obama] and inside the government and they were failing to give the president the intelligence he needed,” said a person who was pitched by Maguire and other Amyntor personnel. To support his claim, Maguire told at least two people that National Security Advisor H.R. McMaster, in coordination with a top official at the National Security Agency, authorized surveillance of Steven Bannon and Trump family members, including Donald Trump Jr. and Eric Trump. Adding to these unsubstantiated claims, Maguire told the potential donors he also had evidence H.R. McMaster used a burner phone to send information gathered through the surveillance to a facility in Cyprus owned by George Soros.

Amyntor employees took potential donors to a suite in the Trump Hotel in Washington, which they claimed was set up to conduct “secure communications.” Some White House staff and Trump campaign supporters came to refer to the suite as “the tinfoil room,” according to one person who visited the suite. This account was confirmed by another source to whom the room was described. “John [Maguire] was certain that the deep state was going to kick the president out of office within a year,” said a person who discussed it with Maguire. “These guys said they were protecting the president.”

Maguire and others at Amyntor have boasted that they have already sent intelligence reports to Pompeo.

Prince, Maguire, and Oliver North have long shared a common frustration over the failure of the U.S. government to bring two suspects from a high-profile terrorist event in the 1980s to justice. Last summer, Maguire discussed rendering the suspects with White House officials after learning the men had been located in the Middle East. Despite having no U.S. government approval, associates of Maguire began working on a snatch operation earlier this year, according to a former senior U.S. intelligence official and a former Prince colleague.

Maguire, concerned that the FBI would not take action, made an offer to senior White House officials. The message, according to a person with direct knowledge of the rendition plan, was: “We’re going to go get these guys and bring them to the U.S. Who should we hand them over to?”

The rendition plan was meant to be a demonstration that Maguire and his associates had an active intelligence network and the capability to grab suspects around the world. Prince maintains he has nothing to do with that plan. But according to a source with extensive knowledge of Prince’s networks, Prince was working in parallel to assemble a team to help apprehend the men.

According to two people who have worked extensively with Prince in recent years, Prince has been contacting former Blackwater personnel who worked on a post-9/11 era CIA assassination program targeting Al Qaeda operatives. That program, which the Bush White House prohibited the CIA from disclosing to congressional intelligence committees, was revealed to Congress in 2009 by CIA Director Leon Panetta. The CIA says the program did not result in any assassinations.

Among the capabilities Erik Prince offers is a network of deniable assets — spies, fixers, foreign intelligence agents — spread across the globe that could be used by the White House. “You pick any country in the world Erik’s been in, and it’s there,” said a longtime Prince associate. “They’re a network of very dark individuals.” The associate, who has worked extensively with Prince, then began rattling off places where the private spies and paramilitaries already operate — Saudi Arabia, Israel, the United Arab Emirates, Egypt, “all across North Africa.”

Opaque contracting arrangements are typical for Prince, who became a lightning rod in his Blackwater days and now prefers to minimize controversy by operating in the shadows, disguising his involvement in sensitive operations with layers of subcontractors and elaborately crafted legal structures. “That’s his exact MO,” said the longtime Prince associate, adding that Prince consistently attempts to ensure plausible deniability of his role in U.S. and foreign government contracts.

“I have zero to do with any such effort and saying that I did/do would be categorically false,” Prince said in his email to The Intercept. “Knowingly publishing false information exposes you to civil legal action. The only effort I’ve quite publicly pitched is an alternative to Afghanistan.”

The intelligence and covert action program would mark an unorthodox return to government service for Prince, the onetime CIA contractor, who built a mercenary force that became notorious during the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. It would also raise new questions about Prince’s foreign entanglements since he sold Blackwater.

In addition to Prince’s former assassination network, the hidden cadre of spies with no official cover — NOCs in CIA jargon — includes the assets of another key player in the Iran-Contra affair, CIA officer Duane Clarridge, who died in 2016. Maguire, who worked under Clarridge as a young CIA paramilitary in Central America during the mid 1980s, took over the network of contract spies, who operate mostly in Afghanistan and Pakistan.

Last summer, as Prince pushed his public proposal to privatize the war in Afghanistan, he and Maguire had broader ambitions, according to a person involved in the discussions. “The goal was to eventually get their network of NOCs worldwide, but they initially started with Afghanistan and Pakistan.”

“Prince seems to be firing on a lot of cylinders and pitching overt and covert plans,” said a current intelligence officer who has closely monitored Prince’s career and has been briefed on several of Prince’s recent efforts, including the proposal to Pompeo. The official declined to discuss details of the plans, but pointed to Prince’s much-discussed pitch to privatize the war in Afghanistan as a smokescreen for offering other more controversial programs and operations.

Prince’s Afghanistan plan, which received substantial media attention and got a hearing at the highest levels of the Trump administration, “was brilliant because it changed the narrative and made him relevant,” the officer said, referring to Prince’s scandal- and investigation-plagued career at Blackwater. The officer also added that the very public Afghanistan pitch, replete with cable news interviews and op-eds, provided a legitimate reason “to justify meeting with people” at the White House, CIA, or other government agencies.

“Erik has no hobbies,” said the longtime Prince associate. “Counterterrorism is his hobby.”

In some ways, these plans mirror operations Prince led during the Bush-Cheney administration. When Prince was running Blackwater, he and a former CIA paramilitary officer, Enrique Prado, set up a global network of foreign operatives, offering their “deniability” as a “big plus” for potential Blackwater customers, according to internal company communications obtained by The Intercept.

In a 2007 email, with the subject “Possible Opportunity in DEA—READ AND DELETE,” Prado sought to pitch the network to the Drug Enforcement Administration, bragging that Blackwater had developed “a rapidly growing, worldwide network of folks that can do everything from surveillance to ground truth to disruption operations.” He added, “These are all foreign nationals (except for a few cases where US persons are the conduit but no longer ‘play’ on the street), so deniability is built in and should be a big plus.”

The longtime associate of Prince said that the nexus of deniable assets has never gone away. “The NOC network is already there. It already exists for the better part of 15 years now,” he said.

Prince has long admired Oliver North and viewed his role in Iran-Contra as heroic, said the Prince associate. In 2007, Prince testified defiantly before Congress following the Nisour Square massacre in Baghdad, in which Blackwater operatives gunned down 17 Iraqi civilians, including women and children. Shortly after his testimony, Prince’s longtime friend, the conservative California Congressman Dana Rohrabacher, praised the Blackwater chief. “Prince,” Rohrabacher said, “is on his way to being an American hero just like Ollie North was.”

North, a Marine lieutenant colonel on the Reagan National Security Council, oversaw a scheme to divert proceeds from illicit arms sales to Iran to Contra death squads in Nicaragua. The resulting scandal became known as the Iran-Contra affair, and North was convicted of three felonies, though these convictions were later thrown out.

Both North and Maguire attended a small reception in 2014 celebrating Prince’s third marriage — to his former spokesperson Stacey DeLuke. “It was an intimate affair,” said the Prince associate. “Only Erik’s closest friends were invited to that reception.” On election night 2016, DeLuke posted photos on social media from inside Trump headquarters.

On November 30, Prince testified behind closed doors before the House Intelligence Committee about his January trip to the Seychelles to meet with Mohammad bin Zayed, the crown prince of Abu Dhabi, and a Russian fund manager close to Vladimir Putin. According to the Washington Post, Prince presented himself as an unofficial envoy of President-elect Trump. The Intercept reported last week that the fund manager was Kirill Dmitriev, head of the Russian Direct Investment Fund. Prince repeatedly said that he did not remember the identity of the Russian, but on Thursday, in testimony before the House Intelligence Committee, Prince admitted that he did in fact meet with Dmitriev.

Prince may have revealed part of his strategy in a July 2016 radio interview with Steve Bannon, when he proposed recreating the CIA’s Phoenix Program, an assassination ring used in the Vietnam War, to battle ISIS. Prince said in the interview that the program would be used to kill or capture “the funders of Islamic terror, the wealthy radical Islamist billionaires funding it from the Middle East.”

A secretive British police investigation focusing on journalists who have worked with Edward Snowden’s leaked documents is still active more than four years after it was launched, The Intercept has learned.

The investigation — codenamed “Operation Curable” — is being led by a counter-terrorism unit within London’s Metropolitan Police, under the direction of the force’s chief of Specialist Operations, Mark Rowley. The Metropolitan Police confirmed the status of the investigation last week in response to a Freedom of Information Act request.

The disclosure that the probe remains active prompted criticism on Monday from the National Union of Journalists, the U.K.’s largest journalists’ organization. Sarah Kavanagh, a spokesperson for the group, said that news reports based on the Snowden documents had exposed unlawful covert surveillance activities in the public interest.

“The media are often the only group in society able to reveal the intelligence and security forces have exceeded their legitimate powers and remit,” Kavanagh said. “The Met Police should be condemned for keeping journalists under investigation because they worked on the Snowden leaks. The investigation should be halted immediately. Journalism is not a crime.”

The origins of the investigation can be traced back to May 2013, when National Security Agency contractor Snowden turned over a cache of classified documents about government surveillance to journalists including Intercept co-founder Glenn Greenwald, who was at that time working for British news organization The Guardian. Among the documents were details about mass surveillance programs operated by the U.K.’s largest spy agency, Government Communications Headquarters.

In August 2013, detectives from the Metropolitan Police used a counter-terrorism law to detain and interrogate David Miranda, Greenwald’s partner, while he was passing through London’s largest airport. Miranda was carrying a batch of encrypted Snowden documents to aid Greenwald’s reporting on the files. The police seized Miranda’s possessions — including a mobile phone, laptop, camera, and flash drives – and began a criminal investigation.

British authorities argued that publishing the Snowden files was itself a terrorist act, thereby explicitly conflating journalism with terrorism. Prior to Miranda’s arrival in London, a memo authored by the Metropolitan Police and domestic spy agency MI5 was circulated to U.K. border entry points. It asserted that “the disclosure [of the Snowden documents], or threat of disclosure, is designed to influence a government and is made for the purpose of promoting a political or ideological cause. This therefore falls within the definition of terrorism.”

In December 2013, one of the London force’s most senior officers, Cressida Dick, was questioned about the case during a parliamentary hearing. She acknowledged that the force’s investigation was looking at whether reporters at The Guardian had committed criminal offenses – some carrying potential 10-year prison sentences – for their role in revealing secret surveillance operations exposed in the documents. “We need to establish whether they have or haven’t [committed offences],” Dick said. “That involves a huge amount of scoping of material.”

Later, however, the Metropolitan Police attempted to keep all details about the case secret. In early 2015, the force refused to confirm or deny whether the investigation existed, and stated that revealing such details could help terrorists and be “detrimental to national security.” The force eventually backed down on this position and admitted the probe remained ongoing, following an intervention from the U.K.’s Information Commissioner’s Office, which enforces freedom of information laws in the country.

Given that the investigation has been active for more than four years, it appears likely that it has required a substantial amount of resources at a time when the Metropolitan Police has faced budget cuts and had to respond to a spate of terror attacks in London. The force has declined to provide any information about the amount of funds spent on the probe, or to disclose the number of officers working on it, insisting that it does not hold records of these details.

Last year, a judge ruled that the U.K.’s counter-terrorism legislation did not sufficiently protect the rights of journalists, after Miranda sued the police for detaining him at the London airport. The judge found that Schedule 7 of the Terrorism Act — the power used to target Miranda and seize his possessions – was “not subject to adequate safeguards against its arbitrary exercise” and was “incompatible” with Article 10 of the European Convention on Human Rights, which protects the right to “receive and impart information and ideas without interference by public authority and regardless of frontiers.”

The Metropolitan Police did not respond to a request for comment on this story.

Do anti-choice activists have a constitutional right to trick vulnerable women seeking an abortion into stumbling instead into a facility run for the purpose of talking them out of one?

And if so, does the state have any right to require the facility to provide the women with basic information about their reproductive rights?

That’s the terrain that will soon be explored by the U.S. Supreme Court, which recently announced it will hear its first abortion-rights related case of the Trump-era. The National Institute of Family and Life Advocates, a nonprofit representing anti-choice pregnancy centers, is challenging California’s requirement that all such centers inform patients that the state provides free or affordable access to contraception, prenatal care, and abortion.

The centers — often called “crisis pregnancy centers” in an effort to conflate them with abortion clinics — must also disclose whether they are medically licensed or have medical professionals available. The law, the Reproductive FACT Act, was passed in 2015 after California’s legislature determined that roughly 200 crisis pregnancy centers across the state employed “intentionally deceptive advertising and counseling practices [that] often confuse, misinform, and even intimidate women from making fully-informed, time-sensitive decisions about critical health care.”

The National Institute of Family and Life Advocates argues that California’s law violates its clients’ First Amendment right to free speech by forcing the centers to advertise abortion-related messages against their religious beliefs.

The Arizona-based Alliance Defending Freedom, a conservative Christian legal advocacy group, is behind the suit. The ADF is also bringing Masterpiece Cakeshop v. Colorado Civil Rights Commission, the high-profile case headed to the Supreme Court next month that will determine whether a Christian baker can lawfully refuse to make wedding cakes for same-sex couples.

Like so many cases that wind through the Supreme Court, legal experts suspect the outcome will turn on Anthony Kennedy – a justice known for his strong support of First Amendment claims.

“This is a case that pro-choice advocates should worry a lot about,” Sam Bagenstos, a University of Michigan law professor, told The Intercept. “It is geared right at where Justice Kennedy is.”

Ilyse Hogue, president of NARAL Pro-Choice America, said the case “could set the stage for how courts treat abortion rights for decades to come” and represents the Court’s “first test on abortion rights with Neil Gorsuch on the bench.”

The passage of the Reproductive FACT Act was hailed as a landmark victory for reproductive rights. NARAL Pro-Choice California was the lead organizational sponsor for the bill, following a national report NARAL released showing how crisis pregnancy centers often mislead women seeking reproductive care. Black Women for Wellness and then-Attorney General Kamala Harris also helped push the bill forward, arguing that California has a responsibility to regulate the healthcare industry and ensure that all residents understand what services are available to them. California is one of several states that covers abortion with state Medicaid funds. Noncompliance with the Reproductive FACT Act comes with a penalty of $500 for first-time offenders, and $1,000 per subsequent violation.

Sen. Kamala Harris’s office did not return The Intercept’s request for comment on the lawsuit.

Crisis pregnancy centers first opened in the late 1960s when individual states began legalizing abortion. They didn’t attract much attention from Congress, though, until the late 1980s and early 1990s. Critics alleged that the centers used deceptive practices to trick pregnant women into coming in by pretending to be an abortion clinic, hiding the fact that they discourage abortion and don’t offer the service; supporters said the centers’ actions were both honest, and legal under the First Amendment.

Crisis pregnancy centers got a boost from the federal government with the passage of the Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act of 1996. Thanks to welfare reform, George W. Bush’s administration was able to funnel $60 million in federal abstinence-only funds to crisis pregnancy centers between 2001 and 2005, often doubling or tripling their annual budgets.

This flurry of activity attracted further attention from Democratic legislators. In 2006, a congressional investigation led by Rep. Henry Waxman, a Democrat from California, found that most crisis pregnancy centers funded by the federal government gave women false or misleading information. In 2008 NARAL also reported that an investigation they had launched into eleven crisis pregnancy centers across Maryland revealed that every center “provided misleading or, in some cases completely false, information.”

In 2009, following the Waxman and NARAL reports, Baltimore passed the first-ever legislation to reign in crisis pregnancy centers. Baltimore’s legislation mandated that the centers display signs that make clear they do not offer abortions or birth control referrals. New York City, Austin, and San Francisco passed similar laws shortly thereafter, and all were soon subject to legal challenges.

The authors of California’s Reproductive FACT Act said they studied these laws when drafting their own, and worked hard to craft legislation that could withstand constitutional muster. For example, California’s law just requires licensed centers to tell women what reproductive healthcare options are available to them, rather than compelling centers to say what they don’t provide.

Hawaii followed California’s lead this past summer, passing a similar law that requires crisis pregnancy centers to display the statement, “Hawaii has public programs that provide immediate free or low-cost access to comprehensive family planning services, including, but not limited to, all FDA-approved methods of contraception and pregnancy-related services for eligible women.” Crisis pregnancy centers, with the help of National Institute of Family and Life Advocates, are now challenging Hawaii’s law in court.

Since California’s law has mostly been tied up in litigation, it’s hard to assess how effective it’s been in regulating crisis pregnancy centers.

“Within a week of it being signed we had five court challenges, four of them in federal courts,” said Amy Everitt, the state director of NARAL Pro-Choice California in an Intercept interview. “I can’t tell right now how well it’s working because it’s been held in this legal limbo. Our plan had been to wait until the court cases settled to assess how enforcement was going.” Everitt said that a bunch of cities and counties agreed to not enforce the law in exchange for the plaintiffs dropping them as named defendants.

However, in Los Angeles, city attorney Mike Feuer announced last summer that his office was indeed successfully enforcing the law. In May 2016 Feuer sent letters to reproductive health facilities in his jurisdiction informing them of their obligations. When investigators from the LA County Department of Business and Consumer Affairs found three crisis pregnancy centers not in compliance with the Reproductive FACT Act, Feuer sent them notices saying they had 30 days to get in line. Two of the three then complied, and when Feuer made clear he would seek a temporary restraining order to compel the third, the third also started following the law.

“I pledged to protect a woman’s right to have accurate information before she makes the most personal and sensitive of choices—and I meant it,” said Feuer at the time. “We will aggressively enforce the FACT Act, taking any action necessary against those who violate it.”

In July 2016, the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals upheld California’s Reproductive FACT Act. “California has a substantial interest in the health of its citizens, including ensuring that its citizens have access to and adequate information about constitutionally protected medical services like abortion,” Judge Dorothy W. Nelson wrote. She said the mandated disclosures do not “encourage, suggest, or imply” that a woman should get an abortion.

In their filing to the Supreme Court, the petitioners suggest that California is unfairly targeting crisis pregnancy centers. “The state, rather than using countless alternative ways to communicate its message, including its own powerful voice, instead compels only licensed facilities that help women consider alternatives to abortion to express the government’s message regarding how to obtain abortions paid for by the state,” the National Institute of Family and Life Advocates wrote.

Everitt of NARAL Pro-Choice California said she was surprised the Supreme Court agreed to hear the case.

David Gans, the director of the Human Rights, Civil Rights, & Citizenship Program at the Constitutional Accountability Center told The Intercept that he sees this lawsuit as part of “a new wave” of First Amendment cases where conservative groups claim “under the guise of freedom of speech” that they can’t be required to be complicit in something they are morally opposed to.

“In the past we’ve seen these arguments in the freedom of religion context, and I think what’s distinctive about both the Masterpiece case and this newer one is that the courts agreed to review them on freedom of speech grounds,” he said. “This highlights what I think will be a big thread in Supreme Court decisions.”

Eugene Volokh, a law professor at UCLA and an expert on First Amendment issues, told The Intercept that he doesn’t see the Masterpiece case as similar to the crisis pregnancy center challenge.

“If you tell people you’ve got to bake cakes for people on an equal basis, is that really a free speech requirement at all?” he asked. “But [in California] there’s no doubt that what the state is doing is trying to require various organizations, including organizations with an ideological mission, to basically convey the government’s message.”

Volokh says the Supreme Court has made clear that “requiring people to speak” poses a First Amendment problem, but that the Court has also suggested that the kind of speech that’s sought out by people because they have specialized expertise, what he refers to as “professional client speech,” may be more susceptible to regulation.

While the justices will have to weigh whether or not California’s disclosure requirements ask too much of these anti-abortion centers, Volokh said there is “not much by the way of guideposts” to figure out how the Court might rule. In Planned Parenthood v. Casey in 1992, for instance, Justice Kennedy upheld so-called “informed consent” requirements, although in that case they were disclosures aimed at deterring abortion.

Kennedy is not always 100 percent consistent, but he’s in a weird place with this case,” said Bagenstos. “He has narrowly supported the right to choose abortion, but he’s obviously personally opposed and believes very strongly that there ought to be an opportunity to be persuaded not to choose it.” Though Bagenstos sees “a really strong argument” in favor of the law’s constitutionality, the plaintiffs, he says, surely recognize that these types of First Amendment arguments likely resonate with Kennedy.

Legal experts note that a win for the crisis pregnancy centers, could, in the end, come back to bite them. In recent years many states have passed laws requiring abortion clinics to provide patients with misleading or medically inaccurate facts, such as telling women that abortions may hurt their mental health or increase their risk of breast cancer. A win for the plaintiffs could make it easier for abortion clinics to challenge these sorts of mandates.

As Gans put it, “Anti-abortion groups urging to intervene and strike down California’s law on First Amendment grounds could help lead to an ideological outcome that perhaps the plaintiffs might not want.”

]]>http://uproxx.com/news/first-amendment-case-abortion-law/feed/2abortion-grid-uproxx.jpguproxxinterceptThe U.S. Decided To Show Up For The U.N. Climate Conference — To Lobby For Coalhttp://uproxx.com/news/us-lobby-for-coal-un-conference/
http://uproxx.com/news/us-lobby-for-coal-un-conference/#respondMon, 20 Nov 2017 19:13:36 +0000http://uproxx.com/?p=400944420

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Most of the people in the room when the United States gave its sole presentation last week at COP23 — the United Nations climate negotiations in Bonn, Germany — were protesters. Around the 20-minute mark, 100 people — mostly Americans — stood up, sang an altered version of “God Bless the U.S.A.,” turned their backs to the panel of White House officials and fossil fuel industry representatives, and walked out. The event then continued before a room filled mainly with journalists.

Panelists soldiered on, peddling one of the Trump administration’s favorite lies: clean coal, or what Trump himself loves to call “beautiful, clean coal.”

Last week was the first time administration officials and their chosen partners — natural gas, coal, and nuclear companies — expounded at length on their strategy on energy both in the United States and around the world, promoting a global vision for continued coal production along with a scale-up in nuclear and natural gas. That the presentation revolved so heavily around so-called clean coal technology — one form of carbon capture and storage, CCS for short, in some iterations — shouldn’t come as a surprise. The phrase has been one of President Donald Trump’s go-to talking points since early on in the campaign trail. At a rally in Phoenix this summer, he announced that, “We’ve ended the war on beautiful, clean coal … They’re going to take out clean coal — meaning, they’re taking out coal. They’re going to clean it.”

Holly Krutka, a representative from Peabody Energy who spoke on the U.S. panel, offered her own explanation of what clean coal is. While she spoke in lucid and complete sentences, walking through the various efficiency technologies, she was no more tethered to reality than Trump. Like the White House’s own proxies, she framed continued coal usage as a moral and ethical imperative and a vehicle for bringing developing nations out of poverty: “While some people clearly believe there is no path forward for fossil fuels in a carbon-constrained world, we don’t believe that is the case. The discussion needs to be not if we use coal, but how.”

CCS can refer to any number of inchoate technologies that suck carbon dioxide out of certain industrial processes, potentially including coal-fired power generation. So-called clean coal doesn’t have a standard definition, but the most charitable reading of the term involves capturing the carbon dioxide generated by coal-fired power plants and either storing it or inserting it into some other productive process. There are currently 17 large-scale CCS projects worldwide, with four more set to launch in 2018.

Its track record so far has been spotty. The Bush-era FutureGen CCS project was imagined as a way to highlight the potential of integrating carbon capture into coal production. After receiving $1 billion in stimulus funds, the project remained plagued by financial troubles and chronically missed its deadlines, eventually leading the Department of Energy to suspend it altogether in 2015. Another showcase CCS project on a power plant in Kemper County, Mississippi, owned by the utility Southern Company, went $4 billion over budget and way behind schedule before switching from coal to natural gas earlier this year. An NRG-owned CCS pilot in Texas, at the Petro Nova plant, has been more successful. That project clocked in on schedule and without going over budget, though only after receiving hearty financial support from the Obama administration. CCS is not yet commercially viable, and CCS projects are too costly to operate without considerable state funds. Private investors in such technologies have also suffered huge losses.

Krutka, an expert on CCS from the industry side who holds a doctorate in chemical engineering, lamented the dearth of funding for CCS and the lack of attention it gets compared to renewable energy sources, even though extractive companies in the United States can take advantage of the generous Section 45Q tax credit for implementing — or claiming to be on the path to implementing — carbon capture. Other panelists opined on the “anti-fossil fuel bias” of international institutions, despite the fact that G20 nations finance fossil fuel projects at four times the rate of renewables. In the United States, the split is even more dramatic: U.S. public finance institutions give $6 billion to fossil fuel companies each year, compared to the $1 billion handed out for renewables. Increased use of “efficient” fossil fuels, panelists contended — involving even more public funding — is necessary for the world to meet its commitments to the Paris Agreement, and the world’s governments simply aren’t doing their part.

Physics tells a different story. If exhausted, the world’s existing oil, gas, and coal reserves would see the world soar well beyond the 2-degrees Celsius warming cap agreed upon in Paris in 2015. Developing existing oil and gas reserves alone would raise the global temperature by 1.5 degrees above pre-industrial levels, according to a 2016 study by Oil Change International. Conservative estimates for meeting even the highest bound of the Paris targets call for a total decarbonization of the world economy by 2050, and well before that in highly developed countries like the United States.

In such a context, scientists warn that continued coal use — with CCS or not — simply isn’t worth the cost. “Clean coal is a very, very dangerous word,” said Corinne Le Quéré, director of the U.K.-based Tyndall Centre for Climate Change Research. Like most people taking a sober look at climate projections, Le Quéré sees CCS as a critical investment — just not when it comes to clearing the way for more coal development. “I don’t think coal is clean at all,” she told The Intercept. “Coal is dirty and produces a lot of emissions. It doesn’t produce as much energy for the emissions as oil and gas. Period. So yes, you can do a little bit to have it be more efficient, but you cannot do a lot. If the U.S. was to develop CCS, then that would be the best contribution they could do now, but they would have to be really very serious about the deployment and implementation of CCS.”

That means the United States must offer more than the tax credits or regulatory rollbacks that have defined the Trump administration’s energy policy so far. Expanding CCS in earnest would mean that “every power plant that is developed has capacity to capture and store carbon dioxide on the ground” within a decade or two, Le Quéré said, “and with demonstrated large-scale implementation in the next few years.”

Of the 17 operational large-scale CCS facilities worldwide, the vast majority funnel captured carbon dioxide back into oil extraction, or “enhanced oil recovery.” That fact that has led some to coin the acronym CCUS: Carbon Capture, Utilization, and Storage, a nod to the fact that captured emissions aren’t always stored. That second “C” — capture — is harder to do and less profitable than simply feeding CO2 into oil production, involving not just considerable amounts of research and development, but also a massive infrastructure build-out to create a network of pipelines far larger than that which currently ferries oil and natural gas around the world.

While CCS installation would represent a significant reduction in emissions from coal plants, the savings wouldn’t be likely to outweigh the harm of putting more coal into the world’s energy mix. “Even coal with CCS is going to carry quite a bit of emissions, and some scenarios — particularly 1.5-degree scenarios — would indicate that you can’t even have coal with CCS because it just emits too much,” another climate scientist, Glen Peters, told The Intercept. “With coal, there are other options to produce electricity. If there are other options, use those. It’s cheaper.” He and Le Quéré were in Bonn to present their new report, which finds that after several stable years, global emissions are rising again. In large part, that’s thanks to the United States and European Union being unable to compensate for increased emissions from developing countries, which have by and large experienced fossil-fueled economic growth over the last few years.

Daunting emissions scenarios aside, how the Trump administration’s bravado on clean coal will translate into reality remains to be seen. “I’ve yet to really understand what the Trump administration means by the term clean coal,” said Brad Page, chief executive officer of the Global CCS Institute, an international group of governmental and corporate partners pushing CCS deployment. “Generally what I hear people talk about clean coal as meaning is really just using the latest, most efficient technology for burning coal in power plants. CCS is there to capture the carbon dioxide and deal with it. These other [clean coal] technologies simply burn a fossil fuel more efficiently but are still highly emissive.”

Embracing clean coal and CCS, in other words, are very different things. Climate projections are painfully clear that we need the latter. Indeed, the models world leaders are crafting their climate policies around aren’t prepared for a future without them.

Climate models from the U.N.’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change now assume that the technology for large-scale CCS already exists and can be scaled up rapidly so long as the price comes down, along with a global price on carbon. “Scenarios in which all countries of the world begin mitigation immediately, there is a single global carbon price, and all key technologies are available,” an official summary of the most recent IPCC assessment report states, “have been used as a cost-effective benchmark for estimating macroeconomic mitigation costs.” Even boosters of more controversial forms of CCS agree at least in part that scaling up CCS will require a mix of supply and demand-side action: massive investment in research and development alongside a strong carbon price, which could still be years away in the U.S., the world’s second-largest emitter of greenhouse gases.

This should disturb anyone interested in living in a world defined by anything other than climate catastrophe. The body charged with predicting the future of life on earth is basing its models for understanding that future on a policy landscape that doesn’t exist, prioritizing a concern for economic growth and efficiency over human survival.

“We have to be cautious about the idea that new technology will solve the problem,” Kevin Anderson, also of the Tyndall Center, told The Intercept. “Established technologies we understand quite well. We know solar panels fairly well. What we don’t know are things like energy storage, and to just assume that they’re going to work is dangerous.

“I’m not saying we shouldn’t have integrated assessment models. They just shouldn’t dominate how we understand the future. And they’re opaque,” Anderson added. “Models are great things, but I think once they get above a certain size, they’re much more about supporting a particular position than to inform … They’re a learning tool. They’re not there to tell you about the future.”

It’s not as if the U.S. government is alone in its embrace of either risky technologies or fossil fuels. China, making impressive progress on renewables and a slate of other climate measures, is financing coal plants throughout Africa. Germany — long-heralded as a pioneer in transitioning away from fossil fuels — remains one of Europe’s largest coal producers, mining a particularly dirty form called lignite. Against the urging of green groups, Chancellor Angela Merkel, now in the midst of attempting to cobble together a government, gave no signal in her address Wednesday that she would try to change that. As they stand now, each country’s Intended Nationally Determined Contributions would send the world well beyond 3 degrees Celsius of warming, more than double the level that small island states have urged is needed for their survival. A global stocktake next year will start to reassess some of these commitments, but big changes aren’t likely to happen until 2023. The United States, it turns out, may be less of a pariah on climate than we might assume.

That shouldn’t suggest that America isn’t an outcast, and that the criticism the administration has faced at COP23 isn’t well-deserved. The White House stands alone on the world stage in its outright endorsement of climate denial, and many Americans — certainly those on the ground in Germany last week, and most of all the ones who interrupted Monday’s panel — are at odds with the Trump administration’s position. Yet baked into the climate negotiations themselves is a quieter kind of denial than the administration’s, in which climate policies are crafted not to align with mounting physical realities, but with the economics that got us into this mess in the first place.

CIA Director Mike Pompeo met late last month with a former U.S. intelligence official who has become an advocate for a disputed theory that the theft of the Democratic National Committee’s emails during the 2016 presidential campaign was an inside job, rather than a hack by Russian intelligence.

Pompeo met on October 24 with William Binney, a former National Security Agency official-turned-whistleblower who co-authored an analysis published by a group of former intelligence officials that challenges the U.S. intelligence community’s official assessment that Russian intelligence was behind last year’s theft of data from DNC computers. Binney and the other former officials argue that the DNC data was “leaked,” not hacked, “by a person with physical access” to the DNC’s computer system.

In an interview with The Intercept, Binney said Pompeo told him that President Donald Trump had urged the CIA director to meet with Binney to discuss his assessment that the DNC data theft was an inside job. During their hour-long meeting at CIA headquarters, Pompeo said Trump told him that if Pompeo “want[ed] to know the facts, he should talk to me,” Binney said.

A senior intelligence source confirmed that Pompeo met with Binney to discuss his analysis, and that the CIA director held the meeting at Trump’s urging. The Intercept’s account of the meeting is based on interviews with Binney, the senior intelligence source, a colleague who accompanied Binney to CIA headquarters, and others who Binney told about the meeting. A CIA spokesperson declined to comment. “As a general matter, we do not comment on the Director’s schedule,” said Dean Boyd, director of the CIA’s Office of Public Affairs.

Binney said that Pompeo asked whether he would be willing to meet with NSA and FBI officials to further discuss his analysis of the DNC data theft. Binney agreed and said Pompeo said he would contact him when he had arranged the meetings.

It is highly unorthodox for the CIA director to reach out to someone like Binney, a 74-year-old ex-government employee who rose to prominence as an NSA whistleblower wrongfully persecuted by the government, for help with fact-finding related to the theft of the DNC emails. It is particularly stunning that Pompeo would meet with Binney at Trump’s apparent urging, in what could be seen as an effort to discredit the U.S. intelligence community’s own assessment that an alleged Russian hack of the DNC servers was part of an effort to help Trump win the presidency.

It is possible Trump learned about Binney and his analysis by watching Fox News, where Binney has been a frequent guest, appearing at least 10 times since September 2016. In August, Binney appeared on Tucker Carlson’s Fox show to discuss his assessment that the narrative of Russia hacking the DNC during the 2016 campaign is untrue, stating that “many people are emotionally tied to this agenda, to tie the Russians to President Trump.” Binney said he is not sure how Trump found out about his analysis.

However the meeting came about, the fact that Pompeo was apparently willing to follow Trump’s direction and invite Binney to discuss his analysis has alarmed some current and former intelligence officials.

“This is crazy. You’ve got all these intelligence agencies saying the Russians did the hack. To deny that is like coming out with the theory that the Japanese didn’t bomb Pearl Harbor,” said one former CIA officer.

Binney, for his part, is happy that the meeting occurred and eager to help Pompeo and Trump get to the bottom of the DNC email theft because he believes the intelligence community has not told the truth about what happened.

“I was willing to meet Pompeo simply because it was clear to me the intelligence community wasn’t being honest here,” Binney said, referring to their assessment of the DNC email theft. “I am quite willing to help people who need the truth to find the truth and not simply have deceptive statements from the intelligence community.”

The analysis by Binney and his colleagues aligns neatly with Trump’s frequent public skepticism of the intelligence community’s assessment that Russia intervened in the 2016 campaign to damage Hillary Clinton’s candidacy and help elect Trump. The declassified summary of a U.S. intelligence community report, based on the work of the CIA, the FBI, and the NSA and made public in early January before Trump’s inauguration, stated that “Russian President Vladimir Putin ordered an influence campaign in 2016 aimed at the US presidential election. Russia’s goals were to undermine public faith in the US democratic process, denigrate Secretary Clinton, and harm her electability and potential presidency. We further assess Putin and the Russian Government developed a clear preference for President-elect Trump.” Trump has frequently raged against the accusation that he won the presidency thanks to help from the Russians, labeling the charge “fake news.”

Binney’s claim that the email theft was committed by an insider at the DNC also helps fuel one of the more bizarre conspiracy theories that has gained traction on the right: that the murder of a young DNC staffer last year was somehow connected to the data theft. Binney said he mentioned the case of Seth Rich to Pompeo during their meeting.

The meeting raises questions about Pompeo’s willingness to act as an honest broker between the intelligence community and the White House, and his apparent refusal to push back against efforts by the president to bend the intelligence process to suit his political purposes. Instead of acting as a filter between Trump and the intelligence community, Pompeo’s decision to meet with Binney raises the possibility that right-wing theories aired on Fox News and in other conservative media can now move not just from conservative pundits to Trump, but also from Trump to Pompeo and into the bloodstream of the intelligence community.

Some senior CIA officials have grown upset that Pompeo, a former Republican representative from Kansas, has become so close to Trump that the CIA director regularly expresses skepticism about intelligence that doesn’t line up with the president’s views. Pompeo has also alienated some CIA managers by growing belligerent toward them in meetings, according to an intelligence official familiar with the matter.

The CIA, however, strongly objected to this characterization. “The Director has been adamant that CIA officers have the time, space and resources to make sound and unbiased assessments that are delivered to policy makers without fear or favor,” Boyd said in an email to The Intercept. “As he has stated repeatedly, when we deliver our assessments to policy makers, we must do so with complete candor. He has also pushed decision making down in the organization, giving officers greater ownership of their work and making them more accountable for the outcomes. These changes are designed to make CIA more agile, aggressive and responsive.”

Yet indications of Pompeo’s willingness to support Trump at the risk of tainting the intelligence process have occasionally broken into the open in recent months. In August, the Washington Post reported that Pompeo had taken the unusual step of having the CIA’s Counterintelligence Mission Center, which would likely play a role in any inquiries by the agency into Russian election meddling, report directly to him. That move has raised concerns within the agency that Pompeo is seeking to personally control the CIA’s efforts to investigate accusations of collusion between the Trump campaign and Russia.

More recently, at a Washington event in October, Pompeo said that U.S. intelligence had determined that Moscow’s intervention hadn’t impacted the outcome of the election. He was quickly criticized for the comments, and the CIA had to issue a clarification saying that the intelligence assessment on Russia hadn’t been altered.

While Pompeo seems to be actively taking Trump’s side on contentious issues like Russian collusion, Dan Coats, the former Republican senator who now serves as director of national intelligence, has been largely missing in action. Coats has been reluctant to push for an aggressive Trump-Russia investigation, according to a source familiar with the matter.

By contrast, Coats’s predecessor, James Clapper, saw himself as the public face of the intelligence community and its spokesperson. Now out of government, Clapper, who was appointed by former President Barack Obama, has become an ardent advocate for a thorough investigation of Trump and Russia. Clapper told Politico in late October that the Russian election hacking was designed to help Trump win. “The Russians have succeeded beyond their wildest expectations,” he said.

With Coats largely out of the picture and Pompeo actively siding with Trump, the intelligence community is effectively leaderless as it struggles to come to grips with its role in the Trump-Russia inquiry. The lack of aggressive support from the intelligence community could hamper the ongoing investigation by Special Counsel Robert Mueller into possible collusion between Trump and Russia. Eventually, that lack of support could make it more difficult for Mueller’s team to glean information from inside Russia.

Pompeo’s meeting with Binney came just days before the first charges from Mueller’s investigation were made public on October 30. Former Trump campaign chair Paul Manafort and his business partner Rick Gates were charged in a 12-count indictment in connection with their work with a pro-Russian party in Ukraine. It was also disclosed that George Papadopoulos, a former Trump foreign policy adviser, pleaded guilty earlier in October to making a false statement to the FBI in connection with his efforts to develop Russian ties during the campaign. Through a plea agreement, Papadopoulos is now cooperating with Mueller’s investigators.

Clearly anxious as the Mueller investigation looms over his presidency, Trump has continued to promote alternative theories that would exonerate him and his campaign. Binney’s analysis falls squarely into that category.

Binney’s adherence to a widely disputed theory about the DNC email theft that is favorable to Trump marks a new twist for a retired government employee who has become an outspoken critic of the intelligence community to which he once belonged. Binney grew up in Pennsylvania, majored in math at Penn State, and joined the Army in 1965. He was assigned to the U.S. Army Security Agency, learning communications traffic analysis and, in 1967, was assigned to NSA headquarters. In 1970, he joined the NSA as a civilian and remained at the agency for the rest of his career. He rose through the ranks to become the agency’s technical director for world geopolitical and military analysis and took over the NSA’s Signals Intelligence Automation Research Center, a kind of skunkworks to test out new ideas.

Late in his career, he began to clash with NSA management, particularly over efforts to drag the hidebound agency into the internet age. He advocated for a sophisticated data search and analysis project called ThinThread that his team had developed in-house, which he believed would help the agency more effectively sift through the torrent of digital information that was starting to appear on the internet. But Binney was outraged when the NSA’s leaders went instead with a more expensive alternative called Trailblazer, offered by an outside contractor. Binney, who thought Trailblazer was deeply flawed and represented a massive sop to a powerful defense company, took his concerns to a congressional staffer involved with NSA oversight. By doing so, Binney angered top NSA officials who were pushing Trailblazer.

Binney retired in the fall of 2001, but not before he learned that the agency was beginning its massive post-9/11 domestic spying program. Binney did not go to the press to discuss the NSA’s domestic spying program, but he did, along with others, complain to the Defense Department’s Inspector General about the Trailblazer program.

After the New York Times disclosed the domestic spying program’s existence in 2005, Bush administration officials wrongly suspected Binney was part of a small group of NSA officials who were sources for the story. As part of a criminal leak investigation, Binney and others had their homes raided by the FBI.

They were never charged, but Thomas Drake, another NSA official who the government thought was part of the same group, was charged under the Espionage Act and accused of leaking information about the controversial Trailblazer program to the Baltimore Sun. The government’s case against Drake eventually collapsed, ending with his agreement to plead guilty to one misdemeanor count of “exceeding the authorized use” of an NSA computer.

Drake and Binney both emerged from the government’s draconian leak investigation as prominent whistleblowers. Their fame grew after former NSA contractor Edward Snowden went public in 2013 and provided the press with access to a trove of NSA documents about the agency’s mass surveillance programs. Binney was featured in “Citizenfour,” the Oscar-winning 2014 documentary about Snowden directed by Laura Poitras; he was also the subject of a 2015 documentary titled “A Good American.” (Poitras co-founded The Intercept following Snowden’s 2013 disclosures.)

In the 2016 presidential election, Binney says he opposed Clinton and voted for Trump. This past summer, as the Mueller investigation was heating up, Binney co-authored a memo, published by members of a group of former intelligence officials called Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity (VIPS), making the case that the DNC emails were not hacked by Russia, but stolen by an insider. The memo argued that the emails were likely downloaded directly from a DNC computer onto a thumb drive or some other external device.

“Forensic studies of ‘Russian hacking’ into Democratic National Committee computers last year reveal that on July 5, 2016, data was leaked (not hacked) by a person with physical access to DNC computer,” the memo states. The memo’s conclusions were based on analyses of metadata provided by the online persona Guccifer 2.0, who took credit for the alleged hack. “Key among the findings of the independent forensic investigations is the conclusion that the DNC data was copied onto a storage device at a speed that far exceeds an Internet capability for a remote hack.”

The memo garnered attention on the right, but its claims have been disputed. It cited timestamps embedded in the Guccifer files showing when they’d been copied, and used this data to extrapolate how quickly they’d been copied from one computer to another. The analysis on which the VIPS memo was based, conducted by a blogger called “The Forensicator,” showed that the files were transferred at a speed roughly equivalent to the rate at which data can be downloaded to a USB thumb drive. VIPS claimed that speed was “much faster than what is physically possible with a hack,” and so the files had to have been stolen by an insider with direct access to the computer system.

But this argument led to a tense split within the VIPS group. Among others, Drake, who for so long had been closely associated with Binney, publicly opposed the memo, joining a group of dissenting VIPS members who have attacked it.

“A number of VIPS members did not sign this problematic memo because of troubling questions about its conclusions, and others who did sign it have raised key concerns since its publication,” states a competing memo written by Drake and other VIPS members and published September 1 on the website of The Nation magazine, which had earlier published a story about the Binney memo.

Drake and the dissenters complain that the original memo was deeply flawed and came to biased conclusions based only on a sketchy analysis of information that originated with Guccifer 2.0, which the U.S. intelligence community believes is a front for Russian intelligence. The dissenters also point out that it is indeed possible for a remote internet transfer to occur at the speeds identified in Binney’s memo. “The environment around Trump, Russia, et al. is hyperpolarized right now, and much disinformation is floating around, feeding confirmation bias, mirroring and even producing conspiracy theories,” the Drake memo says.

“In an ideal world, VIPS would at least retract its assertion of certainty. Absent real facts regarding proof of leaks or hacks (or both), how many hypotheses can one copy onto the head of a digital pin?”

The controversy surrounding the July VIPS memo didn’t seem to deter Pompeo from meeting with Binney. In late September, Binney was in Amsterdam, where he has been working to set up a new data analysis firm called Pretty Good Knowledge, when his wife called to tell him that he had received a call at home from the CIA director’s office, asking to set up a meeting. Binney returned the call to Pompeo’s assistant and scheduled the October 24 meeting.

Binney, who has serious medical problems and uses a wheelchair, asked a colleague from Pretty Good Knowledge, Chris Parker, to accompany him. Parker said in an interview that he helped Binney get into Pompeo’s seventh-floor office at CIA headquarters, shook hands with the CIA director, and then waited outside the office during their meeting. Marco Visser, a Dutch employee of Pretty Good Knowledge who happened to be in Washington at the time, said in an interview that he wanted to accompany Binney and Parker because he had never been to CIA headquarters and was excited to see it, but was not allowed to go because he is a foreign national.

Binney said he was not told what the meeting was about until he sat down with Pompeo. He said that in addition to Pompeo, two other CIA staffers, who gave only their first names, attended the meeting and asked technical questions about Binney’s analysis. When Pompeo asked Binney what evidence he had to support his analysis of the DNC email theft, Binney says he told him that it was based only on the online analyses of information published by Guccifer 2.0.

Binney said that since their meeting, he has not heard from Pompeo about scheduling follow-up meetings with the NSA and FBI.

This week, representatives of three major internet platforms — Google, Facebook, and Twitter — are testifying before Congress about their role in facilitating Russian meddling in the 2016 election. But a fourth giant sat comfortably removed: Amazon.

Instead of getting yelled at by lawmakers, Amazon is on the verge of winning a multibillion-dollar advantage over retail rivals by taking over large swaths of federal procurement.

Language buried in Section 801 of the House-passed version of the National Defense Authorization Act, which is being hashed out in a conference committee with the Senate, would move Defense Department purchases of commercial off-the-shelf products to “online marketplaces.” Theoretically, that means any website that offers an array of options for paper clips or office furniture; in reality that signals likely dominance for Amazon Business, the company’s commercial sales platform.

Section 801 stipulates that the program should be designed “to enable Government-wide use of such marketplaces.” Scale, then, is key. Over time, this change would give platforms like Amazon access to all $53 billion in federal government commercial item purchases.

“It seems like Amazon wrote it,” said Stacy Mitchell of the Institute for Local Self-Reliance, which has written critical reports about Amazon in the past. “It will accelerate the transfer of more and more government spending to Amazon.”

The online marketplace provision, which still has to get through a House-Senate conference, coincides with a significant ramp-up for Amazon Business, which only launched in 2015. Last week, the company introduced Amazon Business Prime, a $499 membership that comes with free two-day shipping for its business-to-business products. The announcement tanked the stock prices of its main industrial supply competitors, Fastenal and W.W. Grainger.

Amazon Business has already surpassed 1 million customers and $1 billion in sales. Its business-to-business growth made up part of its 34 percent revenue increase in the last quarter. But federal procurement is the holy grail,the lucrative market to tap. Perhaps that’s why, for the head of Amazon Business’s public sector division, the company hired Anne Rung, who ran the Office of Management and Budget’s Office of Federal Procurement Policy until fall 2016. This made Rung effectively the top purchasing officer in the United States.

“She probably can’t go back and lobby [her former colleagues at OMB] based on the cooling-off period,” said Scott Amey, general counsel for the Project On Government Oversight, referring to federal ethics laws. “But nothing would prevent her from lobbying others on Amazon’s behalf.”

The idea for online marketplaces came out of the House Armed Services Committee and its chair Mac Thornberry; he initially put the proposal in a standalone bill. Currently, to acquire off-the-shelf items like bottled water or pencils, government agencies sign long-term contracts with suppliers or use the General Services Administration “schedules,” a kind of catalog which sets prices for procurement.

In its NDAA summary, the committee argues that this is too burdensome and too expensive, citing a recent inspector general report showing higher-cost IT products in the GSA schedules than on the open market. “A solution is obvious to most consumers,” concludes the summary, “allow the government to use online commercial sites like Amazon, Staples, or Grainger just as businesses do.”

The definition of an “online marketplace” merely refers to a commercial, non-government portal selling products. And GSA, under the law, must select more than one online marketplace for this purpose. But eligible platforms must offer multiple suppliers for the same product, with constantly changing selection and prices. “I don’t think Grainger does that,” said Mitchell. “Every reference implies we’re talking about a platform where third parties are selling. If that’s the case, we’re talking about Amazon, Walmart [through its e-commerce site Jet.com], and not really anybody else.”

Indeed, Section 801 has been informally dubbed the “Amazon amendment,” and experts believe only one or two companies would have the wherewithal to participate. That means monopoly or duopoly control of $53 billion in federal purchasing.

The online marketplaces, which can be given no-bid contracts, explicitly eliminate the need for government procurement officers to seek out competitive bids for commercial products. As long as they visit the marketplace, that would satisfy any rules about competition, because of the multiple sellers on that platform. But that assumes the platform is a neutral arbiter of what gets purchased.

Amazon not only hosts third-party sales, it competes against those third parties with its in-house brands. Amazon places costs and parameters on third-party sellers on its platforms that can inhibit their ability to compete. And the company has mastered the technique of driving buyers to preferred products, by adjusting search results, or controlling what gets into the “buy box,” the top option it suggests for purchases. Often those preferred suggestions cost more than rivals.

“I don’t think what’s happening on Amazon is a market,” said Mitchell. “It’s a private arena that Amazon controls.”

Even if Amazon always served up the best alternative for any product, it extracts money from third-party sellers for the privilege of using the platform, of anywhere between 15 and 20 percent. If Pentagon procurement, and potentially all federal procurement, shifts predominantly to Amazon, it would collect billions of dollars annually without doing much of anything. The online marketplaces would satisfy small business purchase requirements as well, meaning that a significant portion of what small businesses earn from government spending would leak through to Amazon. A 15 percent skim could represent as much as half of a small business profit margin.

Holding data on regularized federal spending decisions can also prove valuable. “I can imagine Amazon saying, we looked at the data and can make a lot of money selling the Defense Department chairs,” said Mitchell. “We’ll either arbitrarily or through a rule change or increase in fees induce the fiercest competitor in making chairs to leave the portal. And we’ll own that business.”

With the bill mandating dynamic pricing, Amazon can also capitalize on data. If it knows that procurement officials are less attentive buying products on a Friday afternoon, or that they always buy a certain product on a certain day of the month, Amazon can jack up prices at those moments.

This is also another troubling example of government outsourcing. The GSA schedules were created for the purpose of buying commercial items in bulk at a better price than the open market, which makes sense because the government is the nation’s largest purchaser. “There’s a thought GSA isn’t getting the best prices,” said Scott Amey of POGO. “My feeling is, I don’t want to pay what other businesses pay.” In this sense, the government would be effectively giving up its leverage to Amazon.

Technically speaking, there are safeguards in the proposal to prevent ripoffs. A marketplace cannot feature any product based on an exclusive fee; procurement officials are supposed to be able to screen for suppliers and products that have been suspended from government contracting; the GSA is supposed to get full purchase data, including comparison prices from other suppliers. “For the government, that kind of transparency and accountability would be revolutionary,” the House Armed Services Committee report states.

But by the time GSA gets the data, the purchases will already have been made. After-the-fact GSA reports might improve matters over time, but billions could be lost in the process. And Amazon doesn’t have to take fees to feature its own products; they can just blame it on the algorithm.

Amazon has targeted government purchasing at the local level. In January, the company won a contract with U.S. Communities, a coalition of 90,000 local governments. Amazon famously spent years denying the payment of sales tax to local governments; now it’s a major supplier of local government office supplies. Federal agencies also have accounts with Amazon, including at the Department of Homeland Security. “They want to be the go-to source at every level of government,” Mitchell said.

The Senate version of the NDAA, one of the few bills Congress passes every year, does not include the online marketplace provision, meaning a compromise will have to be reached. Negotiations in the conference committee began two weeks ago, and in earnest in the last week. There’s no timeline on when that might be completed.

The Coalition for Government Procurement, an assembly of federal acquisition experts, recommended last month that Section 801 be made into a pilot program, calling the proposal “the most consequential procurement policy changes in a generation.” CGP wants to test compliance with statutory requirements, impact on small business, the use of data and fees, and other unintended consequences.

“Don’t hand over all our purchasing to Amazon,” Mitchell said, referring to the conference committee. “The lack of transparency and accountability is astonishing. Whatever problems there may be with the GSA, this would only compound the same issues.”

]]>http://uproxx.com/news/amazon-amendment-online-marketplaces/feed/4amazon-grid-uproxx.jpguproxxinterceptAccused Of Spying, A Russian Security Firm Will Show Its Code And Operations To Outsidershttp://uproxx.com/news/accused-russia-spying-kaspersky-show-code/
http://uproxx.com/news/accused-russia-spying-kaspersky-show-code/#respondMon, 23 Oct 2017 18:41:50 +0000http://uproxx.com/?p=400884914

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Responding to U.S. government suggestions that its antivirus software has been used for surveillance of customers, Moscow-based Kaspersky Lab is launching what it’s calling a transparency initiative to allow independent third parties to review its source code and business practices and to assure the information security community that it can be trusted.

The company plans to begin the code review before the end of the year and establish a process for conducting ongoing reviews, of both the updates it makes to software and of the threat-detection rules it uses to detect malware and to upload suspicious files from customer machines. The latter refers to signatures and so-called Yara rules, which are the focus of recent allegations.

The company will open three “transparency centers” in the U.S., Europe and Asia, where trusted partners will be able to access the third-party reviews of its code and rules. It will also engage an independent assessment of its development processes and work with an independent party to develop security controls for how it processes data uploaded from customer machines.

“[W]e want to show how we’re completely open and transparent. We’ve nothing to hide,” Eugene Kaspersky, the company’s chairman and CEO, said in a written statement.

The moves follow a company offer in July to allow the U.S. government to review its source code.

Although critics say the transparency project is a good idea, some added it is insufficient to instill trust in Kaspersky going forward.

“The thing [they’re] talking about is something that the entire antivirus industry should adopt and should have adopted in the beginning,” said Dave Aitel, a former NSA analyst and founder of security firm Immunity. But in the case of Kaspersky, “the reality is … you can’t trust them, so why would you trust the process they set up?”

Kaspersky has come under intense scrutiny after its antivirus software was linked to the breach of an NSA employee’s home computer in 2015 by Russian government hackers who stole classified documents or tools from the worker’s machine. News reports, quoting U.S. government sources, have suggested Kaspersky colluded with the hackers to steal the documents from the NSA worker’s machine, or at least turned a blind eye to the activity.

It’s believed the documents or tools were siphoned from the NSA worker’s machines using “silent signatures” — keyword searches that antivirus companies conduct on customer machines to uncover suspicious files and send them back to the company for review. Although silent signatures are an acceptable method for detecting malware, recent stories have suggested that Kaspersky, or Russian government hackers operating with Kaspersky’s knowledge, used keywords that were deliberately designed to search for intelligence about classified U.S. operations, not for malicious code.

That’s possible, although some experts say it’s also possible the collection was inadvertent — that Kaspersky software identified classified NSA malware still in development, or related documents, and uploaded the material to Kaspersky servers, thinking it was a possible infection.

Kaspersky claims to have more than 400 million users worldwide, but that market share is under threat after the government-sourced news reports and after the Department of Homeland Security banned Kaspersky products last month from civilian government systems. Best Buy removed the software from computers it sells based on concerns that it can be used to spy on customers. Although it’s not yet clear if other governments and commercial partners will follow suit, the company is under great pressure to preserve its remaining business relationships.

The source code review would help address concerns that Kaspersky might embed a backdoor in its software or software updates or be forced to do so on behalf of the Russian government, or that the software could contain vulnerabilities that would allow the Russian government or others to hijack it to spy on Kaspersky customers. (The NSA and its British counterpart GCHQ have, at least in the recent past, endeavored to hack and repurpose Kaspersky software for their own purposes.) The review of Kaspersky’s threat-detection rules would respond to concerns that the company could use silent signatures to pull any file from customer computers, not just malicious ones.

And a secure control process for handling data and suspicious files collected from customer machines for analysis could also help ensure that the Russian government, or other threat actors, can’t intercept customer data while in transit from customer machines to Kaspersky’s network, or hack that network to obtain customer data and files after such material is collected.

Even as it works toward the secure process and announces new review structures, Kaspersky acknowledged that trust isn’t a given and that it has to earn the confidence of customers, partners, and others through transparency and accountability.

“I believe that with these actions we’ll be able to overcome mistrust and support our commitment to protecting people in any country on our planet,” Eugene Kaspersky said in his statement.

Jake Williams said he’s not worried about the general security of Kaspersky software and the risk that someone could embed a backdoor in it or hijack it for their own nefarious use. The founder of Rendition Infosec and former NSA employee said that after Kaspersky was hacked in 2014 using a spy tool known as Duqu2, the company conducted a thorough review of its code.

“I honestly think Kaspersky is probably the safest code out there when it comes to antivirus,” said Williams. “I know [Kaspersky] put the work into it to make sure that code is safe. I don’t think others have the same motivation and the same level of desire to get it right. So I think Kaspersky is already the safest on the planet when it comes to that.”

And while Williams agrees with Aitel that the transparency centers and code review are a great idea, he’s not sure the centers adequately address the trust issue. Even if Kaspersky has a third party examining signatures it sends to customer machines, the company could conceivably devise a way to secretly send intelligence-collecting signatures to select customers — signatures that don’t get reviewed.

“I think your critics will still come back and say ‘this is how they will hide stuff’,” he noted.

Williams and Aitel said the company still hasn’t adequately addressed allegations in a recent story which claimed that Kaspersky marketers in the U.S. were pushing the company’s software to U.S. government agencies as a spy tool that could be used to ferret out potential terrorists among other Kaspersky customers. Nor has the company given a straight answer to questions that it used silent signatures to collect the tools from the NSA worker’s machine.

Instead the company’s response until now has been to say it “does not possess any knowledge of the situation in question.”

“If they were innocent, they would be saying, ‘We know exactly what the U.S. is talking about,” said Aitel. “These were the files we pulled off this guy’s machine and this is why we did it — because [they looked] suspicious … and we have logs [we can show you]. But they’re not saying that because some of the stuff that they pulled they had no reason to pull.”

He was arrested in 1995 as an accomplice in his father’s murder of a neighbor; five years later, a prison guard who had given him a disciplinary infraction for eating a sandwich in a hallway was found stabbed to death. Although he continues to maintain that he is innocent, multiple witnesses claimed that Pruett was responsible, and he was sentenced to death for the crime.

For proponents of the death penalty, the events that define Pruett’s life serve as the case for killing him. He spent his pre-prison years in a vortex of violence — getting into fights, stealing, developing a drug addiction. Once he arrived in prison, he briefly flirted with neo-Nazi beliefs, reading “Mein Kampf” and getting a swastika tattoo to intimidate other inmates.

Wherever you fall on the question of Pruett’s guilt or innocence in the prison guard murder, a brief look at his life could make you think that he’s at least the sort of person who may do something like that.

But a person’s life is not defined just by their worst actions. People grow, and they change, and Pruett’s decades in prison gave him time to reflect on the life he had lived. He turned those reflections into an autobiography. It was reviewed in early October by Current Affairs’s Nathan Robinson.

This is probably the most important thing I've written. It was certainly the most difficult to write. https://t.co/1t9dy1OhIw

The autobiography serves as a sort of sociological self-examination — an attempt by Pruett to understand why his life went the way it did. He writes not to absolve himself of the choices he has made, but to impart why he felt like his options were so limited.

“Why are we the way we are? What causes human behavior? … I believe we can understand ourselves and what influences us through an introspective process that includes an examination of our past experiences and the behavioral patterns in our families,” he writes. “Ultimately, we make our own choices in life, but it helps to know why we are inclined or predisposed to certain types of behavior.”

It is almost a cliche to explain criminal behavior through proverbs about a “bad childhood.” But explaining something and justifying it are two different things, and the more you learn about Pruett’s upbringing, the more remarkable it is that someone so deprived of a nurturing environment could grow to write profoundly about the circumstances of his life.

If violent tendencies have a hereditary component, Pruett lost the gene lottery. He describes his father as “the most violent man I ever met”; he had frequent stints in prison, and would get into fights with family and just about anyone else.

Pruett’s family was dirt poor; they were frequently ejected from trailer parks and motel rooms as his father worked minimum wage jobs to try to keep them above water.

But being poor in America is often associated with more than just not having money; violence and crime was all around him. His brother Steven was molested by a family member; his mentally disabled sister was raped and placed into a foster home. His drug addiction started early, when he was offered a huff of gasoline from a stranger at age five. Both parents smoked marijuana, and his dad took him along on a marijuana sale to use him as cover.

Pruett’s writing about prison demonstrates that it was a brutal place. He immediately learns to defend himself against prison rape, and at first becomes even more violent.

But spending the rest of your life behind bars gives you a lot of time to think, and to read. He read the works of Carl Jung and B.F. Skinner, and developed a fascination with psychology. Eventually, he came to see the forces that pushed him towards anger and violence, and that the same forces acted on the African Americans he came to despise during his flirtation with white nationalist beliefs:

I didn’t realize it back then, but all of my anger and hate regarding race was misdirected and ignorant. I was so pissed off at the system for throwing me away that I needed somewhere to focus my negative energy. As the years passed I opened my eyes and matured, slowly growing out of that convoluted ideology on race. Today, I realize that there is no pure race; we all share DNA and we all sprang from the same source…. I understand that more often than not socioeconomic factors play the largest role in how people are treated. The rich and famous have it made; while the poor outcasts from both the ghetto and trailer park have it rough. My hope is that as society evolves, we’ll erase the things that separate and divide us such as race and class.

After being sent to death row, Pruett developed friendships with fellow inmates. As they were executed one by one, he came to the conclusion that the people being executed are no longer the same people they were in the moment of their crimes:

The thing is, they aren’t killing the same people who committed the crimes. It takes years for the appeals to run their course and in that time people change. Sure, some are just dangerous as the day they arrived, and I’m not saying everyone’s some kind of angel, but so many have grown and matured in here and found their true Self. Many have realized the errors of their ways and would be productive members of society if they were given the chance. Even with a life in prison, these guys had much to offer humanity, not to mention the loved ones left with the scars of their murders.

When Pruett is executed on Thursday, he isn’t the same young man who stood and watched his father kill a neighbor over a petty argument, or who may or may not have murdered a prison guard for the same reason. His writing makes clear he is a deeply reflective person who sought to understand the forces bearing down on him for the first time.

Puerto Rico has rejected a bondholder group’s offer to issue the territory additional debt as a response to the devastation of Hurricane Maria. Officials with Puerto Rico’s Fiscal Agency and Financial Advisory Authority said the offer was “not viable” and would harm the island’s ability to recover from the storm.

The PREPA (Puerto Rico Electric Power Authority) Bondholder Group made the offer on Wednesday, which included $1 billion in new loans, and a swap of $1 billion in existing bonds for another $850 million bond. These new bonds would have jumped to the front of the line for repayment, and between that increased value and interest payments after the first two years, the bondholders would have likely come out ahead on the deal, despite a nominal $150 million in debt relief.

Indeed, the offer was worse in terms of debt relief than one the bondholder group made in April, well before hurricanes destroyed much of the island’s critical infrastructure.

Puerto Rico’s Fiscal Agency and Financial Advisory Authority suggested that profit motive rather than altruism was the bondholder group’s real goal. “Such offers only distract from the government’s stated focus and create the unfortunate appearance that such offers are being made for the purpose of favorably impacting the trading price of existing debt,” the agency said in a statement.

Thomas Wagner of Knighthead Capital Management, one of the members of the bondholder group, admitted as much on Bloomberg TV yesterday, saying “What we’re trying to do is lend where our investors are not disadvantaged.” He added that the loan could be a “win-win” for the utility and the bondholders, “where the capital is not expensive.”

If the idea was to increase the value of PREPA bonds, that hasn’t really happened. The bonds were trading at 43.4 cents on the dollar Wednesday according to Bloomberg. Prices were at 52.5 cents in late August.

Hurricane Maria, and Irma before it, left Puerto Rico in shambles, particularly the electric utility. The island’s 3.4 million residents were without power in the immediate aftermath of the storm, and most continue without power today. PREPA has limited ability to restore the grid, given the island’s cash-strapped status.

Creditor groups should “refrain from making unsolicited financing offers at the expense of the people of Puerto Rico,” the fiscal agency said.

Despite growing calls for debt relief, no bondholder has said they would supply it in the days following the storm, nor have creditor lawsuits been withdrawn. However, David Tepper, the hedge fund manager behind Appaloosa LP, did pledge $3 million for hurricane relief from his family charity and the hedge fund. The money would go to Feeding America, a food bank network.

Tepper’s Appaloosa LP is the only non-bank creditor to so much as publicly donate to disaster recovery efforts. Three banks who hold Puerto Rican debt have donated $1.25 million.

When white nationalist Richard Spencer coined the term “alt-right” nearly a decade ago, his movement was marginal, impotent, and striving for respectability. The phrase was a useful euphemism for his genocidal ideology, a palatable alternative to “the Ku Klux Klan” or “the American Nazi Party” to go with his suit, tie, and military undercut.

In the years to follow, as trolling culture grew online and began to adopt the symbols and lexicon of white supremacy — first ironically, then less so — “alt-right” proved a conveniently ambiguous label for the sanitized neo-Nazi movement’s new prankster fellow travelers. The online trolls who flocked to the “alt-right” liked to play footsie with racist extremism, then laugh at anyone who took it seriously. Like their cryptic “Kek” flags and Pepe the Frog memes, the “alt-right” label signaled an allegiance to white nationalism without fully committing to it. It was so malleable, in fact, that during the 2016 election, it expanded to include just about anyone on the right who considered themselves “anti-establishment,” including many of Donald Trump’s rank-and-file supporters.

Now, however, the term has become a liability. Its erosion began as far back as November 2016, when Spencer paid homage to the soon-to-be president with a cry of “Hail, Trump!” Then, in August, the “alt-right” brand cratered. During a far-right rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, meant to bring together a coalition that still regarded itself as the so-called alt-right, crowds of white men were captured on camera giving the Roman — or Nazi — salute. Swastikas abounded. Street fights broke out, and the violence turned deadly: A left-wing counterprotester named Heather Heyer was murdered by a white supremacist.

Just a few days after Klansmen and other extreme right-wing activists marched openly on the Charlottesville streets, far-right YouTube star and conspiracy theorist Mike Cernovich disowned the “alt-right,” calling them “Nazi boys.” “That’s all it is now,” he said in a video, “is a purely anti-Semitic movement.” In 2016, the right-wing website Breitbart had embraced both the moniker and the movement of the “alt-right.” Steve Bannon, who returned to Breitbart as executive chair after resigning as Trump’s chief strategist, infamously called Breitbart “the platform for the alt-right,” and Breitbart reporters Allum Bokhari and Milo Yiannopoulos celebrated the arrival of these “young, creative” far-right instigators, in full recognition of the movement’s racial segregationist dimension. But after Charlottesville, Breitbart angrily denounced its critics for ever daring to insinuate that it was part of the “alt-right” movement, calling it a “smear.”

The Proud Boys, a drinking club of male, far-right street brawlers, who purport to defend “Western values,” are routinelyassociated with the “alt-right.” But the group’s leader, Gavin McInnes, who helped launch Vice Media in 1994 and now runs a right-wing YouTube talk show, has in fact rejected the term for some time, preferring the milder-sounding “alt-light.” McInnes’s insistence that the Proud Boys have nothing to do with the “alt-right” grew even more adamant after the violence in Charlottesville. Last month, in a blog post titled “WE ARE NOT ALT-RIGHT,” he alerted his group that “alt-right” members planned to “infiltrate” Proud Boys meetings and “sabotage” them. Then, McInnes’s attorney threatened to sue The Intercept over a short documentary film I directed, which included about 17 seconds of footage drawn from McInnes’s YouTube shows. His lawyer, Jason Van Dyke, claimed that the film’s “obvious insinuation” is that McInnes is “a white nationalist, a white supremacist, or alt-right,” whereas in reality, McInnes “has no affiliation with the alt-right whatsoever.”

Such is the growing toxicity of the “alt-right” brand post-Charlottesville, and the eagerness of many right-wing groups and leaders to escape its valence. That eagerness, in turn, may suggest that the new far-right movement that coalesced around the Trump campaign last year is splitting into factions, divided over the degree to which they openly embrace an overt white nationalist ideology.

The biggest cleave within what was once collectively known as the “alt-right” is between explicitly white nationalist organizations and the individuals and groups they derisively call the “alt-light.” The term “alt-light” was coined by white nationalists to describe people who agreed with their far-right politics but stopped short of adopting their aspirations for a white ethno-state.

To outsiders, the distinction can appear somewhat academic. Many people associated with the “alt-light” typically have extreme anti-immigrant views, nurture a bizarre paranoia about Islam, and even trade in pseudo-scientific theories about race IQ, expressing sympathies with visions of ethnic cleansing. To the extent that it’s even possible to draw a line between the “alt-light” and the “alt-right,” it comes down to the degree of one’s fixation on race and one’s seriousness about purging the U.S. and Europe of nonwhite people. The “alt-right” is simply the most hardcore faction of an extremist right-wing, xenophobic movement bent on destroying what it perceives to be the domination of mainstream culture by “the left” — which is to say the values of feminism and multiculturalism.

Before Charlottesville, the two factions sustained an alliance in the face of common adversaries, beginning during Trump’s presidential campaign and continuing through the street brawls between the far right and antifascist activists known as antifa in places like Berkeley, California, where the Proud Boys and other “alt-light” groups have fought side by side with avowed white nationalists.

Charlottesville ended that. Stripped of any pretense of facetiousness or trolling, young men who initially signed up for the movement by harassing women on video game forums and posting anti-Semitic frog memes on 4Chan were ill-prepared for a hardcore Nazi and KKK march that exploded into an orgy of violence, and the doxing and shaming that followed. Ever since, some of the most prominent personalities of the far-right have been bolting from the “alt-right” label, and the overall movement has suffered a series of major setbacks as a result.

On August 19, just a week after Charlottesville, a small far-right demonstration in Boston was dwarfed by tens of thousands of antiracist counterprotesters. The right-wing rally, however, had all but fallen apart days before. Prominent speakers, including McInnes, backed out of the event’s lineup. “Charlottesville changed everything,” McInnes explained, claiming that local politicians were trying to incite a riot (the charge is not supported by any evidence). On the day of the event, in the face of the tidal wave of opposition from Boston residents, the rally came to an early close. Far-right organizers who had intended to show their political muscle instead stumbled into a spectacular display of weakness.

Following the far right’s defeat in Boston, an anti-Muslim organization called ACT for America, which bills itself as the “NRA of national security,” canceled 67 planned rallies across the country. In a clear reference to Charlottesville, the group’s press release condemned the KKK and neo-Nazis (along with antifa and the Islamic State) for usurping the supposedly legitimate far-right movement. The public break with overt white nationalists suggested a change of heart for ACT for America, whose “anti-Sharia” rallies earlier in the summer, before Charlottesville, had been attended by members of white nationalist groups Identity Evropa and Vanguard America, both self-identified “alt-right” organizations. Some members of the Proud Boys had attended as well.

The following weekend, organizers of a right-wing rally called “Patriot Prayer,” which was scheduled to take place in San Francisco’s Crissy Field, canceled their event in the face of massive local opposition. Instead, they announced a press conference in a park called Alamo Square, but then canceled that, too. The group ended up livestreaming a public statement while hunkered down in an undisclosed hotel room, as thousands of counterprotesters did an impromptu victory march from Alamo Square to the Mission. (Organizers finally held a public press conference in Pacifica, a surf town 30 minutes south of the city.) The next day, only a handful of right-wing activists turned out to a planned “anti-Marxism” rally in Berkeley.

The split between the white nationalists of the “alt-right” and the often racist demagogues of the “alt-light” is strategically significant, and factored into the far-right’s failure to mobilize further post-Charlottesville. But the actual difference between the two may be more a matter of style than substance.

Two days after Heather Heyer’s death, Gavin McInnes had Jason Kessler, the principal organizer of the Charlottesville “Unite the Right” rally, as a guest on his show (the episode is behind a paywall). McInnes tore into Kessler, telling him, “The blood of this girl, I mean, it’s obviously on the hands of the guy driving the car, but it’s also on your hands.” He accused Kessler of lying to him in the past. Kessler, according to McInnes, had shown up to Proud Boys meetings, but only after claiming he was not “alt-right.” “I never said I wasn’t ‘alt-right,’” Kessler protested, accusing McInnes of using him as a “patsy” in order to distance himself from the events in Charlottesville. “You’re trying to cuck and save your own ass,” he complained.

McInnes and Kessler have not always been on such poor terms. Kessler had appeared on McInnes’s show before, months ahead of Charlottesville. They had a far friendlier conversation about a grisly homicide carried out in Virginia by members of MS-13, a street gang that originated in Los Angeles and El Salvador. In his set-up to the segment, McInnes made some sarcastic jokes about the values of diversity and multiculturalism. “I understand you have a lot of Hispanic people in Virginia right now,” McInnes sneered. Then the two engaged in a graphic discussion of the bloody details of a brutal murder, casually conflating sadistic gang members with immigrants of any kind, documented or undocumented.

The dialogue was unremarkable, standard Fox News fare save for the fact that Kessler’s interest in immigration stems specifically from his white nationalist ideology. “[W]hites will be the only ethnicity on Earth without a country of their own,” Kessler wrote last June in an article in VDARE, an anti-immigration website that frequently publishes the writings of white supremacists. “The governments of the West are waging a campaign of slow extermination against their own core populations,” he wrote. “It is white genocide.”

Kessler’s depiction of a worldwide demise of the white race reflected the animating ideology of the white nationalists who carried tiki torches through the University of Virginia campus on the eve of the “Unite the Right” rally he helped organize. “You will not replace us!” they chanted. “Jews will not replace us!”

Before Charlottesville, however, those sentiments were also right at home on YouTube shows McInnes once designated as being on his side of the “alt-light”-”alt-right” split. “The future of Europe looks pretty halal,” cried right-wing YouTube star Lauren Southern, in a video purporting to explain how white people are “quite literally being replaced” in Europe by Muslims. “You are importing a radicalized low-IQ population into a high-IQ society,” said far-right YouTube personality Stefan Molyneux, on the same subject.

Nor was Kessler the only one among the company McInnes has kept who openly espouses white supremacist or white nationalist rhetoric. The most prominently featured person in the Intercept documentary over which McInnes, through his attorney Jason Van Dyke, threatened to sue is a violent felon named Kyle Chapman, also known as “Based Stickman.” Chapman founded a group called the Fraternal Order of Alt-Knights, which is affiliated with the Proud Boys. Van Dyke sent The Intercept a statement which read, in part, “Mr. McInnes, Mr. Chapman, The Proud Boys, and The Fraternal Order of Alt-Knights reject, in the strongest possible terms, the notion or suggestion that any race — including the white race — is inherently superior to any other race.”

The Intercept film showed Chapman speaking to an audience in Southern California, claiming, “Whites as a group have done far more for this world than any other group.” To wild applause from the crowd, he celebrated hate crimes directed against Muslims in Eastern Europe. “One Muslim steps wrong in one of those countries, and every Polish, Ukrainian, Czech man on the streets will put that son of a bitch in check in two seconds,” he roared. “And that’s how it has to be here.” He proclaimed that the white race has been “targeted for destruction” and invoked a “war on whites,” imploring his audience, “You must sacrifice, you must bleed, and some of you may have to, at some point, die.”

There is nothing subtle, ambiguous, or ironic about Chapman’s statements. Like the chants of the Nazi-saluting far-right foot soldiers in Charlottesville, it is the language of a white supremacist exhorting his admirers to participate in a race war.

In the speech captured in the documentary, Chapman stopped short of calling for the founding of a white ethno-state. In his letter, McInnes’s attorney specifically condemned that dystopian vision. But that’s about the only discernible difference between Chapman’s race-based ideology and that of overt white nationalists, such as Richard Spencer and Jared Taylor — both of whom McInnes has in the past called “pretty reasonable, normal guys.” In his initial communication to The Intercept, Van Dyke cited his client’s “wholehearted condemnation of white nationalism and white supremacy,” but on his show, McInnes has lauded Chapman for being such an inspirational figure on the right, promoting his tough-guy image.

Like his client, McInnes’s lawyer has also distanced himself from his own associations with the “alt-right” brand. Until very recently, Van Dyke, who is a member of the Proud Boys, was listed as a member of the board of directors of an “alt-right” nonprofit called the Foundation for the Marketplace of Ideas. The board also includes Richard Spencer and white nationalist blogger and podcaster Mike Enoch. “I resigned from the board when it went from defending persons being bullied by phony civil rights organizations,” Van Dyke said in an email, “to being the ‘legal arm of the alt-right.’ I did not support this change of direction of the foundation.”

Despite all the protestations, the line between the “alt-light” and the “alt-right” is unclear. It’s a fluid, shifting space that encompasses hardcore white nationalists, who dream of purging the land of nonwhites, and their defenders and apologists, who make the case for white victimization but are careful not to take their arguments to their logical, genocidal conclusions. The “alt-light” has thrived by toying with those blurred boundaries, signaling their allegiance to white supremacist audiences while maintaining the threadbare plausible deniability of irony, trolling, and innocent intellectual speculation.

Charlottesville made that space a little less fluid. There, the Pepe frogs, the “Kek” flags, and all of the other coded semaphores of today’s white nationalism were transformed into less ambiguous symbols: the swastika and the KKK hood. That undeniable display of white nationalism left the leaders of the “alt-light” in a precarious position. At least one has responded by embracing the “alt-right” cause. Others, like McInnes, have become desperate to disown it. But there is little McInnes or anyone else can do to change the plain reality: There is just one new far-right movement, not two, and the most vivid expression of its aspirations were put on display in Charlottesville.

]]>http://uproxx.com/news/charlottesville-far-right-tearing-itself-apart/feed/21Alt-Right-Feat2.jpguproxxinterceptThe Paris Agreement Dispute Is A Distraction. The Real Battle Is Playing Out In The EPA.http://uproxx.com/news/paris-agreement-dispute-distraction-real-battle-epa/
http://uproxx.com/news/paris-agreement-dispute-distraction-real-battle-epa/#commentsWed, 20 Sep 2017 20:24:31 +0000http://uproxx.com/?p=400814681

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For anyone who’s been following the fate of the United States’ involvement in the Paris agreement, the main question surrounding it recently has been pretty clear: Will he or won’t he?

Conflicting reports over the weekend — sparked by a vague Wall Street Journal story on Saturday — alleged that the Trump administration was reconsidering its June decision to withdraw from the landmark climate deal. National Security Adviser H.R. McMaster denied it, only to be upstaged Sunday morning by Secretary of State and former Exxon Mobil CEO Rex Tillerson, whose department would theoretically oversee either a renegotiation or a withdrawal. On this week’s Face the Nation, Tillerson said that President Donald Trump was “open to finding those conditions where we can remain engaged with others on what we all agree is still a challenging issue.”

In what’s being taken as a for-now final word on the matter, chief economic adviser Gary Cohn emphasized Monday that the U.S. will leave the agreement “unless we can re-enter on terms that are more favorable to our country,” doubling down on the line the administration has held since its initial withdrawal announcement.

This weekend’s mixed signals kept reporters busy. Confusion around the agreement may even have put climate change in the news more than the string of hurricanes that have battered the Caribbean and southern United States in recent weeks, the strengths of which can be linked to rising temperatures and sea levels. Materially, though, the Paris agreement’s future in the U.S. may be one of the least important aspects of Trump’s climate policy. It may not even have that big of an impact on the agreement itself.

As conflicting messages shoot back and forth, other members of the administration are quietly unraveling a slew of policies, precedents, and regulations in ways that could make it much more difficult to plan for a low-carbon future after they’re gone. Considering the U.S. accounts for around one-fifth of global emissions, these moves could also make it harder to curb warming worldwide.

Even if Trump is eager to bail on Paris as soon as possible, the United States won’t technically be able to make an official exit until November 2020, the tail end of Trump’s first — and, with any hope, last — term. What he can do is start the process to make that happen, which will be routed largely through a State Department that might still lack the proper staffing to carry out the job.

Effectively, nothing has changed; since the Rose Garden announcement about the decision to bail on the agreement earlier this summer, the White House’s line has always been that it would stay in if it could somehow negotiate a better deal. Multiple countries have also said that the underlying language of the deal won’t change no matter what the White House does.

Most of the document’s emissions reduction plans, meanwhile, are tied to each country’s nationally determined contribution brought to the table in France in 2015.

The central feature of the U.S. commitment that year was the Clean Power Plan, aimed at capping emissions from power production. Scott Pruitt has spent his tenure so far as Environmental Protection Agency administrator making every attempt to dismantle it from within; his agency is currently in the process of reviewing the plan and proposing its replacement, and on a longer term mission to cripple its own authority.

Put simply, whether Trump stays in the agreement means little if the chief means of compliance — the Clean Power Plan — is gutted. On the other hand, if states and companies move in the direction the plan intended even without it in force, Trump’s gutting loses power. After the withdrawal, many have even stated that they intend to strengthen their carbon-cutting plans in response. All of that has more bearing on the atmosphere than Trump’s rhetoric around Paris.

Pruitt has other ways of pushing his agenda, too. As Rebecca Leber chronicled for Mother Jones, he spent the days after hurricanes Harvey and Irma fending off allegations from the Senate that his EPA has grown increasingly nontransparent, insulting German Chancellor Angela Merkel and chiding anyone who dared to mention climate change in relation to the two storms. To top it all off, on September 12, he stalled an Obama-era regulation that kept power plants from releasing toxic metals into wastewater. Research funding proposals must now pass through a public relations head, who reportedly advised staffers to excise the “double C-word” from any funding requests. Inspired partially by New York Times columnist Bret Stephens, he’s also expressed interest in hosting a “red team, blue team” debate on the existence and severity of man-made global warming — an event that could help prime the pump for scaling back the EPA’s ability to regulate carbon.

He’s not alone, either. Expanding fossil fuel production — and minimizing regulations on it — has been a priority for the administration more generally since its first days, when Trump brought both the Dakota Access and Keystone XL pipelines back from the dead. Tillerson is rumored to be in the process of nixing the U.S. climate change envoy to the United Nations. Ryan Zinke this weekend said his Department of the Interior would look to shrink federally protected natural monuments and will soon embark on the first steps toward drilling for oil in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge. The list goes on.

Why, then, are crossed wires around the agreement one of the only times that network news anchors bother to mention rising temperatures?

Still, like the Paris agreement, the climate policies Pruitt and the rest of Trump’s team seem hellbent on destroying were already totally ill-equipped to handle the crisis at hand; together, every national pledge agreed to in 2015 would bring us to around 3 degrees of warming by century’s end. As it stands now — pre-withdrawal — the Paris agreement still leaves us collectively on track for catastrophic levels of warming.

Why, then, are crossed wires around the agreement one of the only times that network news anchors bother to mention rising temperatures?

To see how far off-base our conversations about climate change in the U.S. are, just take a look at debates happening among climate scientists.

A paper released in Nature Geoscience on Monday by a team of climate researchers lays out an ostensibly hopeful scenario: It is “not yet a geophysical impossibility” to cap warming at the “well below 2°C above pre-industrial levels” threshold laid out by the Paris agreement, and even meet its even more ambitious 1.5 C target.

The study, summarized in layman’s terms here, relies on the argument that the 2013 Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change report — considered a gold standard for climate policymakers — overestimates how much warming has already occurred. Having run several studies, researchers brought observed warming to date in line with projections and found that we may be able to emit three times more carbon than the IPCC outlines and still have a reasonably high chance of remaining under 1.5 C of warming.

On the surface, that sounds like great news. Other climate scientists are skeptical of the findings, arguing that researchers underestimate the potential for warmth absorbed by oceans and land in earlier periods of warming to make their way into the atmosphere later. Glen Peters, a senior researcher at the Center for International Climate Research, called the study “breathtaking,” but cautioned in a blog post today against integrating the research team’s findings into mitigation scenarios too quickly, questioning aspects of the paper’s implications that remain uncertain. “Suppose we start to act on their larger budgets, but after another 5-10 years we discover they were wrong. Then we may have completely blown any chance of 1.5°C or 2°C,” he contends.

Peters wrote that he “seriously [hopes] they have this right,” as it could offer “real and tangible hope for small island states and other vulnerable communities.”

What both sides of this debate agree on is that keeping warming below catastrophic levels could be among the greatest challenges humanity has ever faced. The scenario the paper lays out is still plenty stark from a policy standpoint, requiring the world to start working together to hit net-zero emissions in the next 40 years. According to the new study, at current levels of emissions, we’ll use up the carbon budget consistent with staying below 1.5 C within 20 years. “It’s still very difficult to get our emissions down in that space of time,” Richard Millar, the study’s lead author, tells The Intercept. “But it’s really a possibility. …What that means in more concrete policy terms is that both the Paris pledges need to be strengthened at the first possible opportunity” in 2018.

The paper is even more blunt. “Rapid decarbonization,” the allegedly more rosy Nature Geoscience study concludes, “relies on societies being able to swiftly replace existing capital with new investments at massive scales,” adding that the level of emissions reductions required to pre-empt the worst climate impacts “have historically been observed globally only for short periods, such as in the 1930s Great Recession and the Second World War, and regionally in the collapse of the former Soviet Union. Sustained decarbonization at these rates, and the associated capital displacement (run-down and replacement of fossil-fuel infrastructure), would be historically unprecedented.”

That’s the rosy scenario.

What’s also historically unprecedented, though, is large-scale emissions reduction, and Millar points out that he doesn’t “think it’s deterministic that it’s only possible to cut emissions through wars or recessions. We haven’t tried climate policy properly in the past.” That will mean making not just the electricity sector carbon-neutral, but several other aspects of the economy as well.

Though careful to point out the agreement’s role as a stepping stone for further action, Millar notes that its impact “is actually quite boring” — establishing an ongoing process where world leaders can continually reassess their mitigation pledges.

Given that, he also cautioned against seeing the Trump administration in overly apocalyptic terms. “I think it’s unlikely that there’s going to be a huge increase in emissions as a result of this withdrawal. A bigger question is what the impact of the USA on other countries will be, whether it limits their emissions or galvanizes more action,” Millar tells me, referencing the potential for other high-emitting nations to take a similarly hands-off approach to mitigation.

Though countries such as France and Germany have been quick to affirm their commitments to the agreement, countries like India and Russia could still treat U.S. withdrawal as an excuse to lessen their own commitments. “Paris has an important role to play in how it’s laid out a framework, but Paris isn’t the end of the story. It’s just the start,” Millar said.

Brent Saunders the chief executive of Allergan, one of the largest pharmaceutical firms in the world, is concerned that Americans will become fed up, and in an era of increasing political polarization, come to embrace the single-payer health care plan being unveiled Wednesday by Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt.

The candid thoughts were shared last weekend at the Wells Fargo Healthcare Conference in Boston, a gathering for investors and major pharmaceutical and biotech firms.

Americans have lost trust in drug companies, Saunders said, noting the industry consistently ranks lower than oil and tobacco companies in public trust surveys.

“I think we’ve got to do things to bring that trust back,” the executive added. “Because ultimately, someone’s going to be in the White House. Somebody’s going to be in Congress. Someone’s going to be somewhere and going to have to say, ‘Enough’s enough. Let’s just change the whole system. Let’s go to one payer. Let’s do something.’”

While single payer has been discarded as a fringe, far-left idea over recent generations, the policy proposal has gained new traction in the wake of the 2016 presidential election. Many in the Democratic Party are drifting to the ideas of Sanders and other progressives that have long advocated for expanding coverage by providing Medicare to all Americans.

Saunders observed that “the party that seems to be out of power tends to move dramatically to the left or to the right,” and that the Republican Party during the Obama era had lurched far to the right-wing.

“We’re seeing almost the equal, but opposite reaction here now that they’ve been swept out, the left of their party is really taken, gotten a louder voice and taken control,” Saunders continued, speaking about changes to the Democratic Party.

“And so Bernie Sanders and others in that movement, had really tried to vet candidates,” Saunders noted, adding that “they wanted to go to one, that part of the party wants to go to a one payer system.”

Listen here:

Saunders, during his speech to Wells Fargo, touted a statement of principles he released in 2016 calling for a “Social Contract” with patients, promising not to use predatory pricing and other behaviors that have come to define his industry.

But if Saunders is concerned that the public may get fed up with the current system, it may have something to do with how Allergan itself has acted recently. The CEO is under fire in recent weeks for taking the unprecedented step of transferring the patent of one of Allergan’s blockbuster drugs, the eye medication Restasis, to a sovereign Native American tribe as part of a bid to maintain monopoly control of the drug and its revenue.

The highly unusual legal strategy is designed to keep generic drug firms from challenging the Restasis patent, thus lowering the cost to consumers, while keeping Allergan in effective control of the revenue through its deal with the Saint Regis Mohawk Tribe. The Restasis patent was approved 15 years ago and was set to expire in 2014, but the Allergan deal is part of an attempt to renew the patent and extend the company’s control of the drug through 2024.

While serious questions linger about the political viability of single payer, especially for the immediate future under President Donald Trump and a Republican Congress, the center of gravity within the Democratic Party has shifted dramatically in favor the universal Medicare plan that health care executives fear.

In June, as the fight over the repeal of the Affordable Care Act reached its climax, then-White House spokesman Sean Spicer delivered a warning. “It’s not a question of Obamacare versus the AHCA,” he said, referring to the GOP alternative, the since-failed American Health Care Act. The question, Spicer said, was between repealing Obamacare and moving to single payer.

History may prove him right. The battle over the Affordable Care Act is over. The fight for what comes next will begin in earnest on Wednesday with the introduction of Sen. Bernie Sanders’ bill to create a universal Medicare program, the most fleshed-out single-payer proposal ever introduced in Congress.

The campaign for the Vermont independent’s bill will start with the backing of at least 15 Democratic cosponsors and 24 progressive and healthcare advocacy groups, numbers that will only grow in the coming days and weeks.

The bill starts by sweetening the pot for seniors who may be wary about welcoming the rest of the country into their warm pool. It eliminates copays and deductions, except for name-brand drugs when generics are available, and adds dental, vision, and hearing aid coverage to Medicare where it didn’t exist before — huge benefits that have long been a goal of public health advocates.

At the same time, people aged zero to 18 would be eligible for the coverage in the first year. In year two, the eligibility age would be lowered to 45. The next year, it would drop again to 35. In year four, the age restrictions would be eliminated.

The history of the expansion of the New Deal shows that once benefits have been enacted, they are difficult to take away. Opponents of Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid have been working to cut or privatize all three since the day each was enacted, but instead each has grown over time. (The major exception was Aid to Families with Dependent Children, better known as welfare, which was repealed in 1996.)

By phasing in coverage, Sanders makes universal Medicare harder to repeal, and also easier for the public to understand. Everyone gets that transitioning when one turns 65 to Medicare is a relatively painless process. Under Sanders’ plan, people would begin transitioning, after the first year, at age 45 instead of 65. That’s not complicated.

The coverage of of dental care will also be life-changing for millions of people who live in pain — some of whom, unable to afford proper dental care, are even forced to change their diets.

The new Medicare bill leaves the Veterans Administration in place, and also allows tribal health care systems to continue operating as before. It would allow doctors and providers to opt out of the system on an annual basis, meaning that a private system would exist alongside the public system.

Sanders’ bill already has the backing of Democratic Sens. Elizabeth Warren, Mass., Kamala Harris, Calif., Cory Booker, N.J., Al Franken, Minn., and Kirsten Gillibrand of New York, suggesting that the Democratic nominee for president — if he or she comes from the ranks of politicians rather than Hollywood (Oprah, The Rock, etc.) — will more than likely be a backer of Sanders’ bill.

Presuming that the Senate won’t move on Sanders’ bill, it’s first real legislative debate would come if Democrats take the House of Representatives in 2018. Democratic members would face pressure in 2019 to study the bill in House committees and pass a version of it as something of a dry run. If Democrats follow a midterm wave by taking the White House in 2020, they’ll be positioned to move early on health care.

In 1993 and again in 2009, taking on health care at the front end of a Democratic administration turned out badly from an electoral perspective, but Democrats, if Wednesday is any indication, may believe the third time is a charm.

Chat logs obtained from message boards used by neo-Nazis and other far-right groups show a concerted effort to compile private information on leftist enemies and circulate the data to encourage harassment or violence.

The messages were obtained by an anonymous source, who infiltrated and gained the trust of white nationalists and other right wingers and has been leaking the material to Unicorn Riot, a “decentralized media collective” that emerged from leftist protest movements.

The chat logs originate from various web discussion communities hosted by the provider Discord and closed to the public. The communities, which have names like “Vibrant Diversity,” “Ethnoserver,” “Safe Space 3,” “4th Reich,” and “Charlottesville 2.0,” range from having 36 users to 1,269 users. The most active, with nearly a quarter million messages over seven months, is “Vibrant Diversity,” a neo-Nazi community forum that includes a channel called “#oven,” where users share racist memes. The 4th Reich server, the second most active, has 130,000 messages over the course of four months, and includes a channel called “#rare_hitlers,” where users share propaganda posters and other glorified media from Nazi Germany. The “Charlottesville 2.0” server, which contains 35,000 messages, is where the Unite the Right hate rally in Charlottesville was organized.

This article is based solely on chat logs from a community called “Pony Power” (Unicorn Riot published the logs yesterday). The Pony Power server has 50 users, and the chat logs contain just over one thousand messages, posted over the course of 10 days and ranging in topic from far-right politics to advice about digital and operational security to debates about the legal limits of online behavior. The primary activity on the Pony Power server is posting private information like names, photos, home addresses, and phone numbers of dozens of anti-fascist activists.

Victims of the outings, also known as “doxings,” described reactions ranging from terror to anger to annoyance and have variously turned to friends and family for support and locked down their accounts. They said the Pony Power doxing campaign is just the latest in a series of online efforts by neo-Nazis and their allies to marginalize their opponents. The information compiled on Pony Power hasn’t yet been distributed to the larger right-wing extremist community. However, doxing efforts associated with prior online hate campaigns have forced targets to leave their homes in the face of death threats, rape threats, and other forms of harassment. And those attacks were mounted even before President Donald Trump came to power on the back of racist attacks against his predecessor, against Mexicans, and against Muslims, and before he embraced white nationalists or encouraged violence against protesters at campaign rallies.

People chatting on the Pony Power server spoke openly, as though behind closed doors, often using offensive slurs. So be warned, some of the following conversations are hard to stomach.

Scope of the harassment campaign

During the 10-day span that the Pony Power chat logs cover, from August 17 to August 27, so-called “alt-right” members collected private information from over 50 anti-fascist activists from the states of California, Florida, Illinois, Iowa, Maryland, Massachusetts, Minnesota, Missouri, Nebraska, North Carolina, South Dakota, Texas, Virginia, and Washington.

The information collected often included photographs, social media profiles, home address, phone numbers, email addresses, date of birth, driver license numbers, vehicle information, place of employment, and in one instance, a social security number. The justification for doxing these people normally put forward in Pony Power was that they were part of a loosely-structured left-wing movement against fascism known as “antifa,” which has put up some of the most militant opposition to the far right, or because they’re judged sympathetic to antifa, or because they’ve been seen at protests deemed “communist” by the far-righters.

The members of Pony Power often brainstorm methods to increase the effectiveness of their harassment campaigns. One user called “oxycolton” wrote that “we’ve had a lot of people dox antifags but it doesn’t hold,” apparently meaning that the information is lost, in part because they don’t yet have a database to keep track of everything.

“Klaus Albricht,” the most prolific user on the server, suggested a way to accelerate doxing efforts. “We need to separate states by regions and have a set amount of people work on it by region of doxxing antifa, and then work on other regions, or have multiple different teams per region.”

Although this group has collected private information on over 50 anti-fascist activists, it’s unclear how much of it has been made available to the wider right-wing extremist population. “Lupus_Dei – NC” asked if they should post the dox of an enemy to Gab, a social network for hate speech, or if they should wait until they have a full database. User “B1488” responded, “Full database. Dont want to go out all half-cocked.”

Selecting targets

As the neo-Nazis and their allies were preparing for the “Say No to Marxism” rally in Berkeley on August 27, local anti-fascists were busy organizing a counter-protest. Albricht posted a flier for this counter-protest, and asked, “So who is going to be there to stand up against Antifa? This is a good chance to dox them so we can have an idea who they are.” He suggested looking at the counter-protest Facebook page and doxing everyone who was attending, as well as everyone who liked the post.

The crew on Pony Power did not just target antifa; anyone who engaged in activism against racism seemed to be fair game. “Lupus_Dei – NC” posted a link to the Safety Pin Box, which describes itself as “a monthly subscription box for white people striving to be allies in the fight for Black Liberation.” With the link, Lupus_Dei posted the message, “These white allies need doxing.”

Organizations that research hate groups, like the Southern Poverty Law Center, and any leftist groups that work against fascism, were also mentioned as potential targets.

Some of the users feel that doxing anyone that disagrees with their politics isn’t effective enough, and that they need to focus on bigger fish. The user “NSJW” suggests that they should dox journalists and the leadership of activist groups. The next day, NSJW points out a specific journalist that they want to dox because the journalist wrote an op-ed NSJW disagrees with.

User “zayl777” suggests doxing “Marxist professors.”

A few days after zayl777’s comment, Albricht wrote that “it’s time we start mapping out the liberal teachers of universities,” because many people who join antifa come from liberal universities.

Harassing a 22 year old college student because of her shirt

A user asked, “Can we get a doxx on this?” and linked to the Facebook page of a 22 year old college student. In her cover photo, the student is wearing a shirt that says “punch more nazis,” and the photo itself is framed with the words “good night alt-right.”

During this conversation, Albricht described how he tricks suspected antifa members into revealing their IP address by sending them a malicious link. “What happens is the person goes through our link to an actual website, and from there this website logs the IP as it redirects the person without them knowing through their IP tracking website,” he wrote. “It’s perfect to capture these people’s IP addresses from now on.” IP addresses can sometimes be used to ascertain someone’s approximate or specific physical location.

Two hours later, Albricht says he has almost completed doxing the woman. “That one is very active. I have found loads of information. Expect a IP if I can get her dumbass to click the link,” he wrote. “Also there is 2 other people who admitted that they liked her shirt, and that they are either getting one or already have one, so I will be getting their dox too just for future reference if you’d like?”

Then he listed the target’s full name, age, current address, college major and the university she attends, and her username on several social media sites.

“I never clicked the link because it seemed hella sketch,” the woman told me when I reached out to her. The Intercept has granted her anonymity because she’s a victim of a harassment campaign.

“Basically some random guy messaged me on Facebook saying that members of 4chan [a popular hub for troll campaigns], or the alt-right, don’t remember which he said, were doxxing people who had admitted to being antifa and I should check out this link for details,” she continued. “I checked out his profile and it was just full of alt-right propaganda so I was like yeah, okay not falling for that and didn’t click the link and instead just blocked him.”

I asked why she thinks Pony Power users might be doxing her. “I’m not going to rallies or like super connected to any main Antifa work,” she said, “so my best guess would be because I told some Nazi sympathizers on twitter to go fuck themselves, because I’m a member of more left leaning and antifa supporting Facebook groups, and because I’m more vocal on Twitter about my distaste for Nazis.”

Since I contacted her, the woman has locked down all of her online accounts. She has also warned friends who commented on the photo in which she wears the anti-fascist shirt. “I’m annoyed because I’m going to have be paranoid about everything that I do for a while now, and annoyed because I haven’t even done that much to warrant a doxxing, aside from probably just hurting the feelings of someone in the alt-right,” she said.

“I’m also terrified because they have my address, and it’s not just myself who’s at risk, but now also my parents who live here as well,” she told me.

Harassing a survivor of the Charlottesville terrorist attack

On August 12, Emily Gorcenski, a data scientist from Charlottesville, was walking with a group of counter-protesters away from Emancipation Park, where the hate groups were rallying. That’s when a high-speed car, driven by right-wing extremist James Alex Field Jr., plowed into the counter-protestors, killing Heather Heyer and injuring 19 others.

“I was there when the attack happened,” she wrote in an op-ed for The Guardian. “Despite the president deeming me — a transgender woman — unfit for military service, I ran toward the attacker with a weapon. I was ready to engage him if he tried to hurt more people.”

On August 17, NSJW posted a link to Gorcenski’s page on a website dedicated to discussing how best to troll victims (the website was not Pony Power), and said “Gorcenski was at the Cville rally, the torch march the night before as well.”

Twenty minutes later, the user “SleepingInRlyeh,” wrote, “Found Gorcenski’s power word (pre-tranny name).” And 15 minutes after that, he posted her home address, links to her website and social media profiles, and a photograph.

Gorcenski told me that she’s been dealing with harassment since well before the Unite the Right rally. In March or April, she says that users on the aforementioned website dedicated to trolling discovered the name she went by before Emily, and she sent me a screenshot of transphobic harassment on Twitter from July.

“As far as being a target goes, it sucks,” she told me. “These folks are evidently dangerous, as seen from the events of August 11 and 12. […] At the same time, I am accustomed to online harassment and the more energy they pour into me, the less they spend on other folks.”

An armed neo-Confederate from Gainesville, Florida

A Pony Power user called “adolphus (not hitler)” was mostly a lurker, only posting a total of three messages on Pony Power. When another user, “ox,” posted dox on several alleged anti-fascists from Gainesville, Florida, adolphus responded, “Everything @ox is posting are all key figures in Gainesville antifa. I lost my job because of these faggots so any help is appreciated.” Later on, adolphus stated, “lost my job because I was at [Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville] so I’ve got some scores to settle with my local antifa.”

It’s not clear who is behind the adolphus account, but the case of Jim O’Brien, a 44-year-old man also from Gainesville, Florida (like adolphus), gives one example of the sort of alleged activity for which far-right activists were arrested during the Unite the Right rally. O’Brien was charged with carrying a concealed handgun. A few days later, he, like adolphus, was fired from his job, which in his case was at North American Roofing Services. “We do not support the extremist activities that were on display in Charlottesville, Va. over the weekend or any other similar activity,” a memo from his former company states. “We promote a culture of inclusion and diversity.”

According to Southern Poverty Law Center’s Hatewatch blog, “Footage from the rally appears to show O’Brien, marching with the League of the South, punching a woman repeatedly in the face.” League of the South is a pro-slavery neo-Confederate hate group.

The Intercept tried calling and messaging Jim O’Brien, but he did not respond. According to his court documents, he’s not allowed to leave the state of Virginia until his case is resolved. His trial is scheduled for September 22.

Right-wing figures like O’Brien have been targeted by leftists for outing that in many ways resembles the doxing Pony Power conducted against anti-fascists. For example, opponents of neo-Nazis identified another far-right figure at the Charlottesville rally where O’Brien was attested: Peter Cvjetanovic, who appeared in iconic photographs raging and bearing a torch. Now that his fellow University of Nevada, Reno students know that Cvjetanovic is a self-described “white nationalist,” they’ve pressured their school to expel him (university officials said they will not expel him, even though they “unequivocally reject” the views espoused during the rally), and he’s chosen to resign from his on-campus job to avoid trouble.

Anti-fascist activists also publicly identified Cole White, another participant in the Charlottesville rally. Since he was outed, he has lost his job at Top Dog, a hot dog restaurant in Berkeley.

But there’s an important distinction between the doxing that neo-Nazis do and the doxing that antifa activists do. Neo-Nazis target nearly anyone who vocally disagrees with their political worldview — which essentially means anyone who isn’t a racist white person and is public about their views.

Antifa activists only target members of hate groups, a small but growing subset of American society that President Trump refuses to condemn, responsible for mounting terrorist attacks against mosques, black churches, trans women, and people of color.

“Confirmation that antifa is a Jewish organization”

Michael Novick, a 70 year old retired school teacher who lives in the Los Angeles area, has been doing anti-fascist activism for over 50 years. In the 1960s, while studying political science at Brooklyn College, he was elected Study Body President. He was expelled from that position when he staged a sit-in at the registrar’s office, demanding that they open admissions for black and Puerto Rican high school graduates.

In 1987, at the age of 40, he started the Los Angeles chapter of what would later become the activist group Anti-Racist Action, but only after spending “many decades fanning the sparks of resistance and particularly trying to encourage people of European descent like myself to break with and help uproot and overturn white supremacy and imperialism.”

Because Novick is one of the few people publicly associated with Anti-Racist Action, he has been “threatened many times over many years by various neo-Nazis and fascists.” Last February, when anti-feminist activist Milo Yiannopoulos’s scheduled talk at University of California, Berkeley sparked anti-fascist protests, Novick told me that he received “another spate of death threats,” including a threat to attack “the women in [his] life” — even though he wasn’t in Berkeley that day.

After users of the Pony Power chat server discovered that Novick ran several anti-fascist websites, they decided that he must be the leader of antifa. Albricht announced, “We have our lead guys.” They imagined an organizational chart of antifa, with Novick at the top. “Michael is behind what we know as the power structure,” Albricht said. “Let’s get some more info.”

A few minutes later, Albricht posted the dox, proclaiming “I am very certain he started the movement.”

And then Pony Power members stumbled upon what they considered a breakthrough, a YouTube video of Novick speaking at the 2011 Los Angeles Housing & Hunger Crisis Conference in which he says, “I’m of Jewish decent.” This was just the proof that the right-wing extremists needed. “We have confirmation that Antifa is a Jewish organization,” Albricht announced.

“Everybody has certainly always known I am Jewish,” Novick told me. “My father came to the U.S. in the early 30s as a teenager from Poland, and most of his family (many aunts, uncles and cousins) were wiped out by the Nazis either in Bialystok during a ghetto rebellion or in the camps.”

Back in Pony Power, excited about the group’s discovery, Albricht wrote: “Thank you! Now let’s tear these kikes apart!” Members immediately began spreading the idea that Novick, a Jew, was the leader of antifa, and they began making up an organizational chart of antifa that placed Novick at the top, with other antifa leaders reporting back to him.

“There is no antifa command structure. There is no organization ‘antifa’ so there is no organizational chart,” Novick told me. “Some antifa are Jewish. Hardly surprising, given the level of anti-Semitism displayed by the fascists and neo-Nazis.”

When I asked Novick how he felt being a target of a far-right harassment campaign, he assured me that he had support. “I am obviously not happy to be in their cross-hairs,” he said, “but I have many comrades and colleagues locally and nationally who have and will continue to support and defend me and have been aware of the most recent and previous threats.”

Is doxing legal?

During the course of doxing, Pony Power members became concerned that they were engaging in illegal activities, for example by sending malicious links to their victims, such as the 22-year-old college student, to learn their IP addresses.

While IP tracking like this is simple to pull off, the technique itself is similar to a criminal hacker tactic called spearphishing, in which an attacker sends a message their victim in hopes that they’ll click a link and visit a site that tricks them into handing over login credentials.

Other techniques used by Pony Power members included querying domain name registration records as well as DNS servers, which convert domain names into IP addresses.

Members of Pony Power were worried about violating the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act, a broad law frequently used to prosecute hackers, and about inviting criminal conspiracy charges. In one particularly lively discussion between Albricht and NSJW, they argue about exactly what laws they might be violating, and how wise it is to discuss it on a server where there might be infiltrators.

“You guys should NOT be talking about anything that violates the CFAA,” NSJW states. “You will get fucked on conspiracy charges quick if you’re not careful.

Albricht responded, “meh, if they were to raid this group, that would be the least of our worries seeing as doxxing is illegal.”

(It’s unclear why the Klaus Albricht’s name changed to “Klaus Schmidt” and his profile picture changed, but an examination of the chat logs show that this is the same user.)

“I don’t see anything here that would be a CFAA violation,” Nate Cardozo, senior staff attorney at the Electronic Frontier Foundation told me. “Using WHOIS, using historical DNS services, using reverse DNS… The closest thing that I can see to a CFAA violation would be the phishing, where they’re trying to collect IP addresses.”

While the Pony Power doxing doesn’t appear to be in violation of the CFAA, Cardozo left open the possibility that they were violating state harassment or cyberbullying laws.

The most alarming aspect of North Korea’s latest nuclear test, and the larger standoff with the U.S., is how little is known about how North Korea truly functions. For 65 years it’s been sealed off from the rest of the world to a degree hard to comprehend, especially at a time when people in Buenos Aires need just one click to share cat videos shot in Kuala Lumpur. Few outsiders have had intimate contact with North Korean society, and even fewer are in a position to talk about it.

One of the extremely rare exceptions is the novelist and journalist Suki Kim. Kim, who was born in South Korea and moved to the U.S. at age thirteen, spent much of 2011 teaching English to children of North Korea’s elite at the Pyongyang University of Science and Technology.

Kim had visited North Korea several times before and written about it for Harper’sMagazine and the New York Review of Books. Incredibly, however, neither Kim’s North Korean minders nor the Christian missionaries who founded and run PUST realized that she was there undercover to engage in some of the history’s riskiest investigative journalism.

Although all of PUST’s staff was kept under constant surveillance, Kim kept notes and documents on hidden USB sticks and her camera’s SIM card. If they had been discovered, she almost certainly would have been accused of espionage and faced imprisonment in the country’s terrifying labor camps. In fact, of the three Americans currently detained in North Korea, two were teachers at PUST. Moreover, the Pentagon has in fact used a Christian NGO as a front for genuine spying on North Korea.

But Kim was never caught, and returned to the U.S. to write her extraordinary 2014 book, “Without You, There Is No Us.” The title comes from the lyrics of an old North Korean song; the “you” is Kim Jong-il, Kim Jong-un’s father.

Kim’s book is particularly important for anyone who wants to understand what happens next with North Korea. Her experience made her extremely pessimistic about every aspect of the country, including the regime’s willingness to ever renounce its nuclear weapons program. North Korea functions, she believes, as a true cult, with all of the country’s pre-cult existence now passed out of human memory.

Most ominously, her students, all young men in their late teens or early twenties, were firmly embedded in the cult. With the Kim family autocracy now on its third generation, you’d expect the people who actually run North Korea to have abandoned whatever ideology they started with, and have degenerated into standard human corruption. But PUST’s enrollees, their children, did not go skiing in Gstaad on school breaks; they didn’t even appear to be able to travel anywhere in North Korea. Instead they studied the North Korea ideology of “Juche,” or worked on collective farms.

Unsurprisingly, then, Kim’s students were shockingly ignorant of the outside world. They didn’t recognize pictures of the Taj Mahal or Egyptian pyramids. One had heard that everyone on earth spoke Korean because it was recognized as the world’s most superior language. Another believed that the Korean dish naengmyeon was seen as the best food on earth. And all Kim’s pupils were soaked in a culture of lying, telling her preposterous falsehoods so often that she writes, “I could not help but think that they – my beloved students – were insane.” Nonetheless, they were still recognizably human and charmingly innocent, and for their part came to adore their teachers.

Overall, “Without You, There Is No Us” is simply excruciating sad. All of Korea has been the plaything of Japan, the U.S., the Soviet Union, and China, and like most Korean families, Kim’s has close relatives who ended up in North Korea when the country was separated and have never been seen again. Korea is now, Kim says, irrevocably ruptured:

It occurred to me that it was all futile, the fantasy of Korean unity, the five thousand years of Korean identity, because the unified nation was broken, irreparably, in 1945 when a group of politicians drew a random line across the map, separating families who would die without ever meeting again, with all their sorrow and anger and regret unrequited, their bodies turning to earth, becoming part of this land … behind the children of the elite who were now my children for a brief time, these lovely, lying children, I saw very clearly that there was no redemption here.

The Intercept spoke recently to Kim about her time in North Korea and the perceptive it gives her on the current crisis.

JON SCHWARZ: I found your book just overwhelmingly sorrowful. As an American, I can’t imagine being somewhere that’s been brutalized by not just one powerful country, but two or three or four. Then the government of North Korea, and to a lesser degree the government of South Korea, used that suffering to consolidate their own power. And then maybe saddest of all was to see these young men, your students, who were clearly still people, but inside a terrible system and on a path to doing terrible things to everybody else in North Korea.

SUKI KIM: Right, because there’s no other way of being in that country. We don’t have any other country like that. People so easily compare North Korea to Cuba or East Germany or even China. But none of them have been like North Korea – this amount of isolation, this amount of control. It encompasses every aspect of dictatorship-slash-cult.

What I was thinking about when I was living there is it’s almost too late to undo this. The young men I was living with had never known any other way.

The whole thing begins with the division of Korea in 1945. People think it began with the Korean War, but the Korean War only happened because of the 1945 division [of Korea by the U.S. and Soviet Union at the end of World War II]. What we’re seeing is Korea stuck in between.

JS: Essentially no Americans know what happened between 1945 and the start of the Korean War. And few Americans know what happened during the war. [Syngman Rhee, the U.S.-installed ultra-right wing South Korean dictator, massacred tens of thousands of South Koreans before North Korea invaded in 1950. Rhee’s government executed another 100,000 South Koreans in the war’s early months. Then the barbaric U.S. air war against North Korea killed perhaps one-fifth of its population.]

SK: This “mystery of North Korea” that people talk about all the time – people should be asking why Korea is divided and why there are American soldiers in South Korea. These questions are not being asked at all. Once you look at how this whole thing began it makes some sense why North Korea uses this hatred of the United States as a tool to justify and uphold the Great Leader myth. Great Leader has always been the savior and the rescuer who was protecting them from the imperialist American attack. That story is why North Korea has built their whole foundation not only on the Juche philosophy but hatred of the United States.

JS: Based on your experience, how do you perceive the nuclear issue with North Korea?

SK: Nothing will change because it’s an unworkable problem. It’s very dishonest to think this can be solved. North Korea will never give up its nuclear weapons. Never.

The only way North Korea can be dealt with is if this regime is not the way it is. No agreements are ever honored because North Korea just doesn’t do that. It’s a land of lies. So why keep making agreements with someone who’s never going to honor those agreements?

And ultimately what all the countries surrounding North Korea want is a regime change. What they’re doing is pretending to have an agreement saying they do not want a regime change, but pursuing regime change anyway.

Despite it all you have to constantly do engagement efforts, throwing information in there. That’s the only option. There’s no other way North Korea will change. Nothing will ever change without the outside pouring some resources in there.

JS: What is the motivation of the people who actually call the shots in North Korea to hold onto the nuclear weapons?

SK: They don’t have anything else. There’s literally nothing else they can rely on. The fact they’re a nuclear power is the only reason anyone would be negotiating with them at this point. It’s their survival.

Regime change is what they fear. That’s what the whole country is built on.

JS: Even with a different kind of regime, it’s hard to argue that it would be rational for them to give up their nuclear weapons, after seeing what happened to Saddam Hussein and Muammar Gaddafi.

SK: This is a very simple equation. There is no reason for them to give up nuclear weapons. Nothing will make them give them up.

JS: I’ve always believed that North Korea would never engage in a nuclear first strike just out of self-preservation. But your description of your students did honestly give me pause. It made me think the risk of miscalculation on their part is higher than I realized.

SK: It was paradoxical. They could be very smart, yet could be completely deluded about everything. I don’t see why that would be different in the people who run the country. The ones that foreigners get to meet, like diplomats, are sophisticated and can talk to you on your level. But at the same time they also have this other side where they have really been raised to think differently, their reality is skewed. North Korea is the center of the universe, the rest of the world kind of doesn’t exist. They’ve been living this way for 70 years, in a complete cult.

My students did not know what the internet was, in 2011. Computer majors, from the best schools in Pyongyang. The system really is that brutal, for everyone.

JS: Even their powerful parents seemed to have very little ability to make any decisions involving their children. They couldn’t have their children come home, they couldn’t come out and visit.

SK: You would expect that exceptions were always being made [for children of elites] but that just wasn’t true. They couldn’t call home. There was no way of communicating with their parents at all. There are literally no exceptions made. There is no power or agency.

I also found it shocking that they had not been anywhere within their own country. You would think that of all these elite kids that at least some would have seen the famous mountains [of North Korea]. None of them had.

That absoluteness is why North Korea is the way it is.

JS: What would you recommend if you could create the North Korea policy for the U.S. and other countries?

SK: It’s a problem that no one has been able to solve.

It’s not a system that they can moderate. The Great Leader can’t be moderated. You can’t be a little bit less god. The Great Leader system has to break.

But it’s impossible to imagine. I find it to be a completely bleak problem. People have been deprived of any tools that they need, education, information, sharing tools.

[Military] intervention is not going to work because it’s a nuclear power. I guess it has to happen in pouring information into North Korea in whatever capacity.

But then the population are abused victims of a cult ideology. Even if the Great Leader is gone, another form of dictatorship will take its place.

Every path is a catastrophe. This is why even defectors, when they flee, usually turn into devout fundamentalist Christians. I’d love to offer up solutions but everything leads to a dead end.

One thing that gave me a small bit of hope is the fact that Kim Jong-un is more reckless than the previous leader [his father Kim Jong-il]. To get your uncle and brother killed within a few years of riding to power, that doesn’t really bode well for a guy who’s only there because of his family name. His own bloodline is the only thing keeping him in that position. You shouldn’t be killing your own family members, that’s self-sabotage.

JS: Looking at history, it seems to me that normally what you’d expect is that eventually the royal family will get too nuts, the grandson will be too crazy, and the military and whatever economic powers there are are going to decide, well, we don’t need this guy anymore. So we’re going to get rid of this guy and then the military will run things. But that’s seems impossible in North Korea: You must have this family in charge, the military couldn’t say, oh by the way, the country’s now being run by some general.

SK: They already built the brand, Great Leader is the most powerful brand. That’s why the assassination of [Kim Jong-un’s older half-brother and the original heir to the Kim dynasty] Kim Jong-nam was really a stupid thing to do. Basically that assassination proved that this royal bloodline can be murdered. And that leaves the room open for that possibility. Because there are other bloodline figures for them to put in his place. He’s not the only one. So to kill [Jong-nam] set the precedent that this can happen.

JS: One small thing I found particularly appalling was the buddy system with your students, where everyone had a buddy and spent all their time with their buddy and seemed like the closest of friends – and then your buddy was switched and you never spent time with your old buddy again.

SK: The buddy system is just to keep up the system of surveillance. It doesn’t matter that these are 19-year-old boys making friends. That’s how much humanity is not acknowledged or respected whatsoever. There’s a North Korean song which compares each citizen to a bullet in this great weapon for the Great Leader. And that’s the way they live.

JS: I was also struck by your description of the degeneration of language in North Korea. [Kim writes that “Each time I visited the DPRK, I was shocked anew by their bastardization of the Korean language. Curses had taken root not only in their conversation and speeches but in their written language. They were everywhere – in poems, newspapers, in official Workers’ Party speeches, even in the lyrics of songs … It was like finding the words fuck and shit in a presidential speech or on the front page of the New York Times.”]

SK: Yes, I think the language does reflect the society. Of course, the whole system is built around the risk of an impending war. So that violence has changed the Korean language. Plus these guys are thugs, Kim Jong-un and all the rest of them, that’s their taste and it’s become the taste of the country.

JS: Authoritarians universally seem to have terrible taste.

SK: It’s interesting to be analyzing North Korea in this period of time in America because there are a lot of similarities. Look at Trump’s non-stop tweeting about “fake news” and how great he is. That’s very familiar, that’s what North Korea does. It’s just endless propaganda. All these buildings with all these slogans shouting at you all the time, constantly talking about how the enemies are lying all the time.

Those catchy one liners, how many words are there in a tweet? It’s very similar to those [North Korean] slogans.

This country right now, where you’re no longer able to tell what’s true or what’s a lie, starting from the top, that’s North Korea’s biggest problem. America should really look at that, there’s a lesson.

JS: Well, I felt bad after I read your book and I feel even worse now.

SK: To be honest, I wonder if tragedies have a time limit – not to fix them, but to make them less horrifying. And I feel like it’s just too late. If you wipe out humanity to this level, and have three generations of it … when you see the humanity of North Koreans is when the horror becomes that much greater. You see how humanity can be so distorted, and manipulated, and violated.

]]>http://uproxx.com/news/north-korea-paths-lead-to-catastrophe/feed/4north-korea-feat-uproxx.jpguproxxinterceptHarvey Didn’t Come Out Of The Blue. Now Is The Time To Talk About Climate Changehttp://uproxx.com/news/harvey-talk-about-climate-change/
http://uproxx.com/news/harvey-talk-about-climate-change/#commentsWed, 30 Aug 2017 17:03:32 +0000http://uproxx.com/?p=400775352

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Now is exactly tthe time to talk about climate change, and all the other systemic injustices — from racial profiling to economic austerity — that turn disasters like Harvey into human catastrophes.

Turn on the coverage of the Hurricane Harvey and the Houston flooding and you’ll hear lots of talk about how unprecedented this kind of rainfall is. How no one saw it coming so no one could adequately prepare.

What you will hear very little about is why these kind of unprecedented, record-breaking weather events are happening with such regularity that “record-breaking” has become a meteorological cliché. In other words, you won’t hear much, if any, talk about climate change.

This, we are told, is out of a desire not to “politicize” a still unfolding human tragedy, which is an understandable impulse. But here’s the thing: every time we act as if an unprecedented weather event is hitting us out of the blue, as some sort of Act of God that no one foresaw, reporters are making a highly political decision. It’s a decision to spare feelings and avoid controversy at the expense of telling the truth, however difficult. Because the truth is that these events have long been predicted by climate scientists. Warmer oceans throw up more powerful storms. Higher sea levels mean those storms surge into places they never reached before. Hotter weather leads to extremes of precipitation: long dry periods interrupted by massive snow or rain dumps, rather than the steadier predictable patterns most of us grew up with.

The records being broken year after year — whether for drought, storm surges, wildfires or just heat — and are happening because the planet is markedly warmer than it has been since record-keeping began. Covering events like Harvey while ignoring those facts, failing to provide a platform to climate scientists who can make them plain, all while never mentioning Donald Trump’s decision to withdraw from the Paris climate accords, fails in the most basic duty of journalism: to provide important facts and relevant context. It leaves the public with the false impression that these are disasters without root causes, which also means that nothing could have been done to prevent them (and that nothing can be done now to prevent them from getting much worse in the future).

It’s also worth noting that the coverage of Harvey has been highly political since well before the storm made landfall. There has been endless talk about whether Trump was taking the storm seriously enough, endless speculation about whether this hurricane will be his “Katrina moment” and a great deal of (fair) point-scoring about how many Republicans voted against Sandy relief but have their hands out for Texas now. That’s politics being made out of a disaster — it’s just the kind of partisan politics that is fully inside the comfort zone of conventional media, politics that conveniently skirts the reality that placing the interests of fossil fuel companies ahead of the need for decisive pollution control has been a deeply bipartisan affair.

In an ideal world, we’d all be able to put politics on hold until the immediate emergency has passed. Then, when everyone was safe, we’d have a long, thoughtful, informed public debate about the policy implications of the crisis we had all just witnessed. What should it mean for the kind of infrastructure we build? What should it mean for the kind of energy we rely upon? (A question with jarring implications for the dominant industry in the region being hit hardest: oil and gas). And what does the hyper-vulnerability to the storm of the sick, poor, and elderly tell us about the kind of safety nets we need to weave, given the rocky future we have already locked in?

With thousands displaced from their homes, we might even discuss the undeniable links between climate disruption and migration — from the Sahel to Mexico — and use the opportunity to debate the need for an immigration policy that starts from the premise that the U.S. shares a great deal of responsibility for the key forces driving millions from their homes.

But we don’t live in a world that allows for that kind of serious, measured debate. We live in a world in which the governing powers have shown themselves all too willing to exploit the diversion of a large scale crisis, and the very fact that so many are focused on life-and-death emergencies, to ram through their most regressive policies, policies that push us further along a road that is rightly understood as a form of “climate apartheid.” We saw it after Hurricane Katrina, when Republicans wasted no time pushing for a fully privatized school system, weakening labor and tax law, increasing oil and gas drilling and refining, and flinging the door open to mercenary companies like Blackwater. Mike Pence was a key architect of that highly cynical project — and we should expect nothing less in Harvey’s wake, now that he and Trump are at the wheel.

We are already seeing Trump using the cover of Hurricane Harvey to push through the hugely controversial pardoning of Joe Arpaio, as well as the further militarization of U.S. police forces. These are particularly ominous moves in the context of news that immigration checkpoints are continuing to operate wherever highways are not flooded (a serious disincentive for migrants to evacuate), as well as in the context of municipal officials tough-talking about maximum penalties for any “looters” (it’s well worth remembering that after Katrina, several African-American residents of New Orleans were shot by police amid this kind of rhetoric.)

In short, the right will waste no time exploiting Harvey, and any other disaster like it, to peddle ruinous false solutions like militarized police, more oil and gas infrastructure, and privatized services. Which means there is a moral imperative for informed, caring people to name the real root causes behind this crisis — connecting the dots between climate pollution, systemic racism, underfunding of social services, and overfunding of police. We also need to seize the moment to lay out intersectional solutions, ones that dramatically lower emissions while battling all forms of inequality and injustice (something we have tried to lay out at The Leap and which groups like the Climate Justice Alliance have been advancing for a long time.)

And it has to happen right now – precisely when the enormous human and economic costs of inaction are on full public display. If we fail, if we hesitate out of some misguided idea of what is and is not appropriate during a crisis, it leaves the door wide open for ruthless actors to exploit this disaster for predictable and nefarious ends.

It’s also a hard truth that the window for having these debates is vanishingly small. We won’t be having any kind of public policy debate after this emergency subsides; the media will be back to obsessively covering Trump’s tweets and other palace intrigues. So while it may feel unseemly to be talking about root causes while people are still trapped in their home, this is realistically the only time there is any sustained media interest whatsoever in talking about climate change. It’s worth recalling that Trump’s decision to withdraw from the Paris climate accord — an event that will reverberate globally for decades to come — received roughly two days of decent coverage. Then it was back to Russia round-the-clock.

A little more than a year ago, Fort McMurray, the town at the heart of the Alberta boom in tar sands oil, nearly burned to the ground. For a time, the world was transfixed by the images of vehicles lined up on a single highway, with flames closing in on either side. At the time, we were told that it was insensitive and victim-blaming to talk about how climate change was exacerbating wildfires like this one. Most taboo was making any connection between our warming world and the industry that powers Fort McMurray and employed the majority of the evacuees, which is a particularly high-carbon form of oil. The time wasn’t right; it was a time for sympathy, aid, and no hard questions.

But of course by the time it was deemed appropriate to raise those issues, the media spotlight had long since moved on. And today, as Alberta pushes for at least three new oil pipelines to accommodate its plans to greatly increase tar sands production, that horrific fire, and the lessons it could have carried, almost never comes up.

There is a lesson in that for Houston. The window for providing meaningful context and drawing important conclusions is short. We can’t afford to blow it.

Talking honestly about what is fueling this era of serial disasters — even while they’re playing out in real time — isn’t disrespectful to the people on the front lines. In fact, it is the only way to truly honor their losses, and our last hope for preventing a future littered with countless more victims.

In January 2015, Aubrey Reinhardt came to an important conclusion: It was time to get on birth control.

The 20-year-old Texas Tech University senior was in a serious relationship, and after a prudent discussion with her partner, she’d made up her mind. Analytical by nature, Reinhardt sought information on her options and narrowed down the list of contraceptives she wanted to know more about. Ultimately, that might have been the easiest part of the process.

Through friends and family, she knew that Planned Parenthood was a trusted source for reproductive health care, but in the Panhandle city of Lubbock, that would not be an option. The university town’s two Planned Parenthood clinics had closed down in 2014, the result of a series of ill-fated political decisions made by state lawmakers hellbent on fully defunding the 100-year-old provider.

Reinhardt asked around and was told that the university’s medical center was now the go-to for birth control. On a cloudless, cold winter day, she and a friend headed to campus to see the doctor. It did not go well. After assessing Reinhardt’s medical history, the doctor said she believed Reinhardt had a blood-clotting problem and was “too unhealthy” to be on birth control. While it is true that Reinhardt had a minor health scare the year before, any clotting problems had been ruled out before she underwent surgery to address the issue. Reinhardt was stunned. “I thought, Where the heck is this coming from?” she recalled recently. “This is bizarre to me, but I’m thinking, OK, she’s a medical professional … and I’m a kid and I’m trusting her.”

The doctor said she would consider prescribing contraceptives, but only if Reinhardt would get her primary care doctor and her surgeon to fill out packets of paperwork. She would also have to visit a hormone specialist and request additional documentation. “I was as baffled as you are right now,” she said. When the doctor left the room, Reinhardt and her friend tried to figure out what had just happened. “I’m getting a little bit emotional because I’m like, this is a bombshell that’s just been dropped on my life, like I must be very ill and I just don’t even know it.”

When the doctor returned and saw Reinhardt crying, she was scornful. “’Why are you so upset, why are you crying? Are you really in that big a hurry to become sexually active?’” Reinhardt recalled her saying. “And that was the moment that … everything clicked with me: This isn’t an issue with my health, this is an issue of a doctor who doesn’t agree with what I’m wanting.”

Reinhardt tried to contact a reproductive health clinic that had promised it would pick up the slack after Planned Parenthood left town, but it had already folded its operations. She tried another provider but was told it would take four months to get an appointment. Frustrated and angry, Reinhardt called Planned Parenthood — maybe there was a clinic somewhere nearby and she just wasn’t aware of it. No, she was told, there wasn’t a clinic anywhere in the Panhandle, an area more than twice the size of Massachusetts. The two closest clinics still open were four hours southwest, in El Paso, and four hours east, in Fort Worth.

Reinhardt ended up getting an implanted, long-acting contraceptive in Fort Worth — without needing additional paperwork from her primary care doctor, her surgeon, or a hormone specialist. She understands that for all she had to go through to get the birth control she wanted, she was still fortunate: She had the resources and support to make it happen. But she worries about those who don’t have the same advantages — women whose ranks have grown since 82 reproductive health clinics across the state closed in response to legislative actions, a third of which were Planned Parenthood clinics. “People are going without health care,” she said. “Even though I’m sitting here upset, I know there are people who are also upset and in more dire situations.”

Reinhardt’s assessment is on target: 16 percent of Texans live below the federal poverty line, and at 24 percent, the state has the highest percentage of uninsured women of reproductive age.

But instead of finding realistic ways of expanding access to accommodate this need, state officials have focused their efforts on defunding their ideological foe, Planned Parenthood. This has taken several forms, the most obvious of which is the passage of many onerous restrictions on abortion care. But perhaps even more destructive is the decision to bar Planned Parenthood from participating in any state-funded health care programs, regardless of the fact that none of those funds pay for abortions. In that arena, Texas has been entirely successful — even if it has also drastically reduced the ability of low-income women to access subsidized care.

To date, Medicaid funding is the only remaining pot that the state has been powerless to withhold from Planned Parenthood. That is primarily because the federal fee-for-service program contains a provision ensuring that recipients are able to seek care from a provider of their choice. The provision mandates that recipients may seek services from any provider qualified and willing to furnish them.

In an April 2016 advisory to state Medicaid officials, Vikki Wachino, then-director of the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, housed under the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, wrote that states “may not” act on a “desire to target a provider or set of providers for reasons unrelated to their fitness to perform covered services.” In other words, states can’t block Planned Parenthood clinics from providing birth control and pelvic exams just because they don’t like that some clinics also offer abortion services.

The “clarifying” letter was timely. Over the last few years, a number of states have tried to ban Planned Parenthood from Medicaid by claiming it’s not qualified to provide care based on widely discredited videos that purport to show Planned Parenthood officials selling fetal tissue. A federal judge blocked Texas’s attempt to do this earlier this year. Only one state hasn’t yet been blocked in this effort. On August 16, a panel of federal judges cleared the way for Arkansas to withhold funds from the provider. Whether that ruling will stand remains to be seen.

Texas, however, remains unbowed. In its application for a so-called Medicaid waiver program, the state is seeking to circumvent previous court rulings by asking the federal government to waive the freedom of choice provision altogether. If the government grants the request, allowing the state to deny patients the right to choose where they receive care, Texas will have successfully drawn a roadmap for other ideologically driven states to follow in its footsteps, withholding millions in federal funds from the reproductive care giant and reducing access to health care for potentially millions of women.

Through a Medicaid waiver program, a state can receive permission to opt out of certain federal rules in order to try a new health care delivery model. Typically, this involves waiving some of the financial eligibility requirements in order to expand the patient pool.

Ten years ago, Texas did exactly this when it asked to expand access to reproductive health care for women not poor enough to qualify for Medicaid unless they were pregnant. Under the program, for every $1 Texas put in, the feds would kick in $9.

It was a good financial deal for the state and intended not only to expand access to birth control and related care, but also to decrease the number of unintended pregnancies paid for by Medicaid — a significant issue in Texas, where the program pays for more than half of all births.

Known as the Women’s Health Program, the pilot got off the ground in 2007, and with concerted effort, it grew quickly. In 2008 alone, the program reduced the number of unintended pregnancies that Medicaid would have paid for by more than 10,000, saving more than $92 million in costs to both the state and federal governments. By the end of 2011, the program’s enrollment surged to nearly 130,000, with 90 percent of those women accessing the covered services. By all measures, the program was working.

But lawmakers were unhappy. Planned Parenthood was serving more than 40 percent of the program’s clients, making it the single largest provider of WHP services. So they crafted a new rule that would ban any entity “affiliated” with an abortion provider from participating in the program.

Blocking Planned Parenthood would violate Medicaid’s provider of choice provision, the federal government told the state in late 2011. Unless Texas lifted the new affiliate rule, its application to renew the program would be denied. The state refused, foregoing federal funding and claiming it could run the women’s health program just fine on its own.

That did not turn out to be true. From 2011 through 2016, the program was twice rebranded and enrollment dropped 24 percent. Over the same period, there was a 39 percent drop in the number of women in the program who were actually receiving services. Equally troubling, the number of women able to access birth control dropped 41 percent, according to a new study from the Center for Public Policy Priorities in Austin.

Research from the Texas Policy Evaluation Project, housed at the University of Texas’s Population Research Center, found that in the wake of the policy changes that ousted Planned Parenthood (and other smaller clinics), the number of women receiving long-acting reversible contraceptives, like the one Reinhardt received, decreased by 35 percent. And the number of women receiving injectable contraceptives declined by 31 percent, while the number of Medicaid-paid pregnancies among this group subsequently rose by 27 percent.

These numbers have not fazed Texas lawmakers, who continue to insist that they know how to run a successful women’s health program that excludes the single highest-volume supplier of care — going so far as to force a director at the agency overseeing the program to retire for having participated in research that proved the exclusion actually restricted access to care.

The state points to a dramatic increase in enrollment and the number of participating providers over the last year — up to 202,584 women enrolled in June and 5,342 providers signed up to participate — as some proof of the program’s success. But there are major caveats. First, enrollment rose because the state is now automatically extending coverage for mothers who’ve just had a Medicaid-paid birth. That’s a great thing, says Stacey Pogue, who ran the WHP in its first years and is the author of the CPPP’s latest report, but she is concerned that without clear direction from the state, those women might not be aware of the program or the fact that they’re covered by it. And even if they are, “that doesn’t mean they’ll ever get services,” she said.

That is because although the raw number of providers has increased dramatically — to include a number of individual doctors — many of them don’t actually see clients. Analysis of state data Pogue and colleagues did several years ago revealed that more than 50 percent of program providers saw “zero or one woman” annually, she said.

And there’s nothing to suggest that has changed. The latest incarnation of the program — now known as Healthy Texas Women — started in the summer of 2016. It is unclear how many clients have been served to date. An April report from the Health and Human Services Commission revealed that just over 60,000 women had received services through February; a report from May omits data about the current fiscal year.

And news about at least one of the organizations awarded a hefty contract by the state has raised eyebrows. The Heidi Group, granted more than $1.5 million under Healthy Texas Women, has no experience in providing women’s health care. Carol Everett, its founder and CEO, is an anti-abortion activist who has run a network of crisis pregnancy centers that exist primarily to encourage women to carry unwanted pregnancies to term.

Everett’s group said it could serve slightly more than 50,000 women with the state grant — a number that is shocking to Pogue and others. “That is an astounding number,” Pogue said. “That is more than Planned Parenthood served when it had 51 clinics in the program.” The Heidi Group has fewer than two dozen clinics and doctor’s offices signed on to provide care. At least one of the providers the group has contracted to serve the program’s clients is a crisis pregnancy center, Wise Choices, which does not provide birth control — let alone any other medical services.

Despite its mediocre track record at ensuring low-income women have access to birth control and other preventive health care, Texas is applying with the feds to transform Healthy Texas Women into a Medicaid waiver program, a move that would unleash millions in federal funding. But instead of just asking for a waiver to increase eligibility, this time the state is also asking that the government waive the program’s provider of choice provision.

There is reason to think that Texas’s bid to do away with freedom of choice could be successful — not least of which is that it appears the feds approached the state to ask that it reapply for the funding. Carrie Williams, press officer for the Texas Health and Human Services Commission, acknowledged as much to the Houston Chronicle. She wouldn’t say who was nudging the state, only that “the sentiment is that the federal government may be open to new ideas.”

Under President Donald Trump, the Department of Health and Human Services has taken a decidedly hostile attitude toward women’s health. Secretary Tom Price infamously asserted that women don’t need help to access birth control. To run the nation’s family planning program, the president tapped an anti-abortion crusader, Teresa Manning, who doesn’t believe that birth control works.

His pick to run the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, Seema Verma — an ally of Vice President Mike Pence — is perhaps best known for using a Medicaid waiver to create a program in Indiana that actually restricted access to care and made some enrollees pay premiums.

In March, Verma told a group of female health care professionals that “as a mother and as a woman, the most important thing about my health care is being able to pick out the doctor that I feel comfortable with.” Still, women’s health advocates are concerned that she may not feel the same way about low-income women who need Medicaid in order to access care.

“The Texas waiver request is a new attempt to circumvent federal protections for women’s health,” Clare Coleman, president and CEO of the National Family Planning and Reproductive Health Association, said in a statement. “A CMS approval of Texas’s waiver would perpetuate a failed experiment. Women should have the ability to choose the health provider that they know and trust … regardless of income level.”

Technically, the freedom of choice provision can be waived, but “you can only waive that provision if doing so furthers the goal of the Medicaid program,” says Pogue. And it has never before been waived in connection with a family planning program. “A state has never come and said, we have a more efficient network if we just go with these” few, limited providers, she said. Certainly, Texas has demonstrated that “there is no benefit” to waiving the choice provision. “You cannot further the goals of Medicaid by excluding your most efficient provider.”

Pogue and others worry that if the federal government breaks precedent and waives freedom of choice for reproductive health, it would encourage other states to seek to do the same. Since 2015, at least 10 states have tried to block Planned Parenthood from receiving any Medicaid funds.

Texas “has spent years crippling a once-successful program supporting family planning and related services for low-income residents,” Kinsey Hasstedt and Adam Sonfield with the Guttmacher Institute wrote in July for Health Affairs Blog. “Now, the state is asking the likeminded Trump administration to provide an infusion of federal funding to support its diminished program. In the process, Texas and the Trump administration could set dangerous new precedents that could undermine family planning care in Medicaid programs nationwide.”

Indeed, Pogue notes that if the state is successful, it won’t be Texans who are hurt: The damage to the state’s health care safety net has already been done. Rather, the victims would be women in other states where access to care could be devastated, as it has in Texas. “I think the real point is, when Texas told itself a story … of ‘we can exclude a provider for whatever reason and our program will be fine, and women’s access will be fine because there are other providers to pick up the slack,’ it turns out that is not true,” she said.

There are two paths here and they are “mutually exclusive,” she notes. You can kick out a trusted, high-volume provider like Planned Parenthood and decrease access to services. Or, you can increase access and have a thriving program. “But you can’t do both.”

“That’s what Texas said they could do,” she said, “and that’s certainly not what the Texas experience shows.”

For Reinhardt, the experience of trying to access birth control in the wake of the closures of Planned Parenthood clinics in Lubbock stayed with her.

She’s in law school now, in North Texas, where she founded a chapter of the reproductive justice group If/When/How, and has become a passionate advocate for Planned Parenthood and the expansion of reproductive care access.

She worries the federal government will approve Texas’s waiver but still has hope it will see such a decision as a disaster in the making. “Plenty of states look to Texas for guidance on these kinds of policies, and it’s alarming,” she said. “This may have happened to me two years ago, but not only am I feeling the repercussions of this, but other people are too — and they’re still experiencing these issues every single day throughout Texas.”

]]>http://uproxx.com/news/texas-trump-planned-parenthood/feed/0PP-Feat.jpguproxxinterceptHospitals In Trump Country Are Suffering As Muslim Doctors Are Denied Visas To The U.S.http://uproxx.com/news/hospitals-trump-muslim-doctors-us-visas/
http://uproxx.com/news/hospitals-trump-muslim-doctors-us-visas/#commentsFri, 18 Aug 2017 20:12:48 +0000http://uproxx.com/?p=400753445

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Every March, doctors across the United States and the world eagerly await “Match Day” — the day they find out what residency, internship, or fellowship program they matched to. By that point, residency candidates have completed medical school and passed a series of rigorous qualifying exams. For those who are not American—about a quarter of all doctors in the United States are foreign-born — there’s one additional step: securing a J-1 visa, a nonimmigrant exchange visa conditioned on an individual’s return to his or her home country for at least two years at the conclusion of the program.

In the weeks following the March 17 match, dozens of Pakistani physicians had their J-1 applications denied in Islamabad and Karachi, said Shahzad Iqbal, a Pakistani-American physician in New York.

Jan Pederson has spent the last 30 years of her legal career representing foreign-born physicians coming to the United States for residency or fellowship programs. It’s an unheralded but essential line of work, because without foreign doctors, the U.S. healthcare system would simply collapse, with the pain felt most acutely in rural areas. U.S. medical schools don’t produce anywhere near enough graduates to meet the needs of the country, particularly in places where people are reluctant to move to.

Like any legal practice, Pederson’s hasn’t always been smooth. Every so often, a client’s visa application is denied. It happens. In the years following the Sept. 11, 2001 terrorist attacks, doctors from countries like Iran and Syria saw their applications get stuck in administrative processing until U.S. officials could affirmatively say the physicians posed no national security threat, she said.

But this spring, weeks after President Donald Trump issued a revised version of an executive order restricting immigration from six Muslim-majority countries, Pederson saw the same thing Iqbal did, what she called an “epidemic of Pakistani visa denials.”

Advocates say there is no way to separate the attempted Pakistani physician ban from the so-called Muslim ban and other Trump administration immigration policies.

“I think it’s a confluence of factors,” that caused the visa denials, said Pederson, the immigration attorney. “It would be hard to escape the conclusion,” that there is a correlation between the visa denials and the president’s anti-immigration rhetoric and policies.

“This year, we had about 34 J-1 refusals that were reported to us. This is kind of a historic number,” said Iqbal, who chairs the Committee on Young Physicians, which is a part of APPNA, or the Association of Physicians of Pakistani Descent of North America. APPNA only knows about denials that were reported to them by the rejected applicants, so it may be just the tip of the iceberg. Many re-applied, starting from scratch, and were successful, but started their programs late.

APPNA has lobbied on behalf of Pakistani doctors hoping to train in the United States since 2003, Iqbal said. Heightened post-9/11 security measures meant that many visa applications were held up in administrative processing, but “it never happened before that there was a mass number of denials,” he said. “Before, there were security clearances and people were placed in security clearance for six months to two years.”

For the last five years, APPNA received reports of at most one or two physicians whose visa applications were denied, and usually, it was because of an issue with an applicant’s immigration history.

This is concerning, Iqbal said, because Pakistan is one of the top suppliers of foreign doctors to the United States. In 2015, 12,125 doctors of Pakistani descent were practicing medicine in the United States, second only to India’s 46,137 doctors, according to the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development.

Of the 2,766 international medical graduates who received J-1 visas for the first time for the 2017-2018 training year, 257 were from Pakistan, according to the Educational Commission for Foreign Medical Graduates, which oversees international medical graduates in the U.S. workforce. Among the 34 doctors who reported visa denials to APPNA this year, 30 of them were ultimately granted visas after reapplying multiple times or had their applications sent into administrative processing, Iqbal said. Two doctors’ visas remain denied, and another two lost their spots in residency programs, which started on July 1, in Massachusetts and New York, and are therefore no longer eligible for visas. (Iqbal said the program directors at those hospitals gave APPNA a verbal promise that the physicians’ seats would be saved for next year, but he declined to name them out of fear of jeopardizing those agreements.)

“There have been no significant changes specific to the J-1 visa application process this year,” the State Department told The Intercept in a statement. “Every visa applicant undergoes extensive security screening.”

What happened to the Pakistani doctors is likely an indirect consequence of the White House’s immigration policies, such as increased vetting, said Matthew Shick, director of government relations and regulatory affairs at the Association of American Medical Colleges.

“[Pakistan] is not on the travel ban list, but in general there’s a lot of fear in the Pakistani community over changes that have been happening,” said Greg Siskind, a Memphis-based immigration lawyer and member of the International Medical Graduate Taskforce, an organization of lawyers who work with international medical graduates who want to work in the United States.

This year’s batch of Pakistani physicians are completing residencies around the country, in states such as Georgia, Kentucky, Minnesota, New York and New Jersey, Iqbal said. Many of them matched to hospitals in medically underserved communities. “The foreign graduates get into programs where Americans don’t want to go,” he said.

“They take care of the sickest of the sick and the poorest of the poor,” Pederson said.

After completing their residencies, many international medical graduates seek a waiver of the requirement that they return home for two years under a federal program known as Conrad 30. In exchange, they pledge to work for three years in an area designated by the federal government as having a shortage of health professionals or being medically underserved. Participation in the Conrad 30 program creates a pathway to citizenship, and as a result, many foreign-born doctors launch their careers serving rural communities and economically disadvantaged populations.

Small-town America has relied on foreign-born doctors for years, but, like the rest of the country, the demand for doctors exceeds the supply. By 2025, America will have a physician shortfall of between 61,700 and 94,700 physicians, according to a 2016 AAMC report. The dearth of doctors is one reason to be concerned about the Pakistani doctors’ visa denials, Shick said. “As we face shortages, denying any physician that is accepted into a residency program is a bit short-sighted,” he said.

In denying the doctors’ visa applications, American diplomatic outposts in Pakistan cited a broad provision of the immigration code that says non-citizens are not entitled to nonimmigrant visas unless they overcome a presumption of immigrant intent, Pederson said. In other words, applicants must prove to the satisfaction of the consular officer that they are not intending to fully emigrate, a task often accomplished by showing family, employment or financial ties to the applicant’s home country. The consular officer’s discretionary decision cannot be appealed (though they can start from scratch and re-apply, as many did), but it makes little sense to Pederson that dozens of applications were denied this spring.

Both Pederson and Shick said they are not aware of a group other than Pakistani physicians that saw a significant increase in J-1 visa denials this year, although Shick said his group is still sorting through the data.

“It’s very anomalous in this situation since all of them virtually had been issued B1/B2 visas [another class of temporary, nonimmigrant visas] for lawful purposes such as taking the [United States Medical Licensing Examination], attending in-person residency interviews, and undertaking observerships,” Pederson said.

Although most of the doctors had their visas approved after re-applying, Iqbal fears what happened this year will impact Pakistani physicians’ prospects in years to come.

“It’s scary for medical graduates because it is a ripple effect,” he said. “Now, for next year, the program directors will be reluctant to take the Pakistani physicians there. They won’t get matched.”

]]>http://uproxx.com/news/hospitals-trump-muslim-doctors-us-visas/feed/6muslim-doctors-feat-uproxx.jpguproxxinterceptFearful Villagers See The U.S. Using Afghanistan As A ‘Playground For Their Weapons’http://uproxx.com/news/afghanistan-us-weapons-playground/
http://uproxx.com/news/afghanistan-us-weapons-playground/#commentsTue, 15 Aug 2017 18:15:33 +0000http://uproxx.com/?p=400746471

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The province of Nangarhar, in eastern Afghanistan, is bearing the brunt of ongoing U.S. airstrikes against the Taliban and fighters who have declared allegiance to the Islamic State. Half of July’s U.S. airstrikes in Afghanistan — at least 358 strikes — took place in eastern Nangarhar, according to the Bureau of Investigative Journalism. And according to United Nations data released last month, U.S. strikes in Nangarhar are more likely to result in civilian casualties than strikes anywhere else the country. On July 23, one of these strikes reportedly killed at least eight civilians, including children, who were attending a funeral, allegations of which the U.S. military is investigating.

Just last week, Afghan officials said that a U.S. attack in Nangarhar killed 16 civilians, including women and children. A spokesman for the U.S. military denied those claims, saying that the strike was “against militants [who] were observed loading weapons into a vehicle.”

But in the remote and dangerous areas where most of these strikes take place, it is often impossible to know the true identities of the victims, and many strikes go unreported. And among local villagers, distrust of both the United States and President Ashraf Ghani’s U.S.-backed government runs high.

In interviews with The Intercept this past May, villagers in Khogyani, a Taliban-controlled district of Nangarhar, described living with the threat of U.S. Special Operations ground raids and regular drone strikes. Few foreigners visit Khogyani, and even Afghans from the provincial capital, Jalalabad, prefer to avoid its villages, where insurgents rule the ground and U.S. warplanes haunt the skies.

“A few days ago, another drone strike took place. The victims were innocent farmers and their women and children,” said Shafiqullah, a driver from Basakhel.

Shafiqullah also described how locals fear the U.S. drones that appear when the sky is clear. “Many people, like myself, remove our SIM cards regularly to avoid being located,” he said. The United States has been known to identify and track targets based on the unique codes of their SIM cards. (The Intercept was unable to identify which strike Shafiqullah was referring to, although there were several strikes reported in Nangarhar at the end of April and in early May where the exact location was unclear. The London-based Bureau of Investigative Journalism, which keeps a comprehensive list of public reporting on strikes in Afghanistan, relies largely on local press reports and statements from U.S. and Afghan military officials, which do not always specify where the strike occurred. U.S. Central Command did not respond to a request for comment on the allegations of civilian casualties in this article.)

When the Trump administration dropped the so-called “mother of all bombs” on an alleged ISIS hideout in Nangarhar in April, the Afghan government reported that more than 90 ISIS militants had been killed. The Pentagon refused to provide a number, and the U.S. and Afghan military blocked access to the strike zone, preventing outside observers and journalists from entering.

For many locals in Khogyani, which lies about an hour away from Achin, the use of the bomb was just another example of what they perceive as U.S. aggression, whether directed at Taliban insurgents or ISIS fighters.

“As usual, they had killed civilians and wanted to hide their crimes,” said Mustafa, a student from the village of Basakhel. “The U.S. is abusing our country as a playground for their weapons.”

Since the emergence of ISIS-allied militants in Afghanistan in 2015, the United States, working with Afghan forces, has reportedly killed a high number of militants through a series of airstrikes, conducted by both conventional aircraft and drones. In most cases, the identities of the alleged insurgents have not been verified, and most strikes are not investigated, opening up the possibility that many more civilians have been killed.

“The United States has been carrying out increasing numbers of air and drone strikes as this year has gone on, and a lot of them have been in Nangarhar. The full toll of these strikes in lives is not known because independent investigation is not possible,” said Jack Serle, who has been tracking drone strikes in Afghanistan since 2014 for the BIJ.

Since neither the U.S. nor the Afghan army often has access to the areas they are bombing, such as Khogyani, they rely on signals intelligence from electronic communications, and imagery taken from above. “This suggests that [the] civilian death toll will be higher than what little data we have shows, and higher than the U.S. and Afghan military realize,” said Serle.

Khogyani locals have noticed that airstrikes have increased since Donald Trump became president. “We faced war and destruction also during Obama’s era but since Trump took over the presidency, the strikes increased hugely,” said Esmatullah Bashari, a Taliban-allied commander in the district. Both local civilians and members of the Taliban maintain that most of the victims have been noncombatants.

With bravado typical of local commanders, Bashari – who once fought against the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan and is also known as a famous poet in the region — said he and his fighters were the only ones to have fought the ISIS militants effectively. “Two years ago, they also controlled Khogyani. We recaptured the district and lost 300 men,” he said.

Bashari also argued that the White House’s drone policy in the region has become a catalyst for extremism and insurgency. “After every strike, people, sometimes the whole clan, join our fight,” said Bashari, with characteristic exaggeration. “Especially when women and children get killed, the anger is enormous, they don’t have any other choice than to fight.

“The Americans don’t differentiate between civilians and insurgents. Everyone here is considered a terrorist,” Bashari said. He claimed that he had twice been targeted by drone strikes in the past two years, including one that hit a jirga, or local tribal assembly, which he was attending. At least five people — civilians, according to Bashari — were killed, while he and other Taliban fighters survived. But while Bashari escaped death at the hands of the United States, he was killed on July 14 by an unknown gunman in a Khogyani market.

Taliban fighters in Khogyani described how the deaths of family members had caused them to take up arms. As with the case with Bashari, they did not say exactly where and when the drone strikes occurred, so their accounts could not be corroborated. It is also the case, as Serle noted, that many strikes go unreported given the remoteness of the region.

Jahan Baaz, a tall, sturdy man, said that two of his brothers were killed in drone strikes a year ago, and that he believes it is his duty to fight the Americans and their allies. Another fighter, barely 20 years old, claimed that his father had also been killed by an American drone, which led him to join the insurgents.

Such a reaction can be expected, said Patricia Gossman, a senior researcher on Afghanistan with Human Rights Watch. “Each civilian death for which U.S. or NATO forces are perceived to be responsible increases hostility toward them, and may increase support for anti-government forces,” she said.

]]>http://uproxx.com/news/afghanistan-us-weapons-playground/feed/3bombs-feat-uproxx.jpguproxxinterceptTrump’s Opioid Commission Had Some Stunningly Good Recommendations. He Ignored Them For 80s Drug War Nostalgia.http://uproxx.com/news/trumps-opioid-commission-80s-drug-war-nostalgia/
http://uproxx.com/news/trumps-opioid-commission-80s-drug-war-nostalgia/#commentsWed, 09 Aug 2017 19:29:31 +0000http://uproxx.com/?p=400735496

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The Trump administration will not declare a public health emergency related to the opioid epidemic, dismissing the top recommendation his own blue-ribbon commission called for a week ago. The commission argued such a declaration was critical to unlock emergency funding and expand treatment.

Health and Human Services Secretary Tom Price said at a Tuesday news conference that public health emergencies have traditionally been limited to specific areas of the country, like after Hurricane Sandy. “We believe… that the resources that we need, or the focus that we need to bring to bear to the opioid crisis at this point can be addressed without the declaration of an emergency,” Price said.

Some experts might react to Trump declining to invoke an emergency with a sigh of relief; lots of mischief could be accomplished with such expanded powers. But in remarks at a hastily arranged “major briefing,” the president seemed to want to respond to an epidemic that took over 33,000 lives in 2015 (numbers that could be underreported, according to a new study) with a time warp to the failed policies of the 1980s.

“The best way to prevent drug addiction and overdose is to prevent people from abusing drugs in the first place,” Trump said from his golf club in Bedminster, New Jersey. “So if we can keep them from going on and maybe by talking to youth and telling them: ‘No good, really bad for you in every way.'”

If you were reminded of Nancy Reagan’s cameo on Diff’rent Strokes, you’re not alone. But “Just Say No” didn’t work as a policy 35 years ago — teenagers in programs like DARE were as likely to use drugs as those who weren’t. It also initiated the school-to-prison pipeline by creating “drug-free schools” and other policies of overcriminalization. And it’s particularly useless for an opioid epidemic where adolescents aged 12-17 represent a little more than one-tenth of those affected.

Even if a just-say-no policy could reduce to zero the number of new people who initiate heroin use, that would still leave a massive population of people living with substance use disorders, all of them at risk of overdose and death.

But the only other strategy Trump mentioned to fight opioid abuse was also a throwback: the tough-on-crime policies of the war on drugs. He lamented a decrease in federal drug prosecutions under President Obama, and lower sentences for dealers “that poison our communities.” He vowed “strong law enforcement” and getting “very, very tough” on the southern border and China, “where much of this comes in.”

This aligns with tough-on-crime policies endorsed by Attorney General Jeff Sessions. While Trump’s opioid commission did propose interdicting the entry of deadly fentanyl from China, this represented just one of their dozens of interim recommendations, none of which the president cited. Instead, he fell back on the drug war, which led to zooming incarceration rates and no letup in drug use during the Reagan years and beyond.

While Trump’s abstinence and supply-side approach would do nothing for that already-addicted population, his commission put forward some shockingly reasonable suggestions. The best that can be hoped for, perhaps, is that Trump won’t get around to reading the report, and will just ask that it be implemented.

so, i’m waiting for trump’s opioid briefing to start and just noticed … the white house spelled opioid wrong pic.twitter.com/nyCvLlOp4Y

Even without the emergency declaration, at least one of the commission’s recommendations would transform the U.S. approach to the crisis and give those in its grip a real chance of recovery. It’s an approach that was embraced by the surgeon general in a report in November and consistently by the Office of National Drug Control Policy under President Obama.

Immediately establish and fund a federal incentive to enhance access to Medication-Assisted Treatment (MAT). Require that all modes of MAT are offered at every licensed MAT facility and that those decisions are based on what is best for the patient. Partner with the National Institutes of Health (NIH) and the industry to facilitate testing and development of new MAT treatments.

MAT has proven to reduce overdose deaths, retain persons in treatment, decrease use of heroin, reduce relapse, and prevent spread of infectious disease. Expansion of MAT availability for qualified individuals and for short- or long-term treatment is an essential DRAFT 5 component of treatment services. Yet approximately 10 percent of conventional drug treatment facilities in the United States provide MAT for opioid use disorder.

Individuals seeking SUD treatment, and even those currently enrolled in a treatment system, often find barriers to using MAT as a component of their treatment. Particularly for populations with opioid use disorders (OUDs) involved in the criminal justice system, there is often inadequate access to FDA-approved medications that are proven to improve outcomes as part of a full continuum of care. Multiple studies have shown that individuals receiving MAT during and after incarceration have lower mortality risk, remain in treatment longer, have fewer positive drug screens, and have lower rates of recidivism than other individuals with OUDs that do not receive MAT. The DOJ, in consultation with HHS and ONDCP, should be directed to increase the use of MAT for OUDs in these correctional settings.

In addition, the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) should require all federally-qualified health centers (FQHCs) to mandate that their staff physicians, physician assistants, and nurse practitioners possess waivers to prescribe buprenorphine.

There are several barriers to the use of MAT, including a prevalent belief that use of MAT does not constitute true recovery or sobriety. The Federal Government, as a major purchaser of health care services, has a tremendous opportunity to increase the availability of MAT for individuals with OUDs. For example, across the Veterans Administration (VA) and Indian Health Services, there is a lack of providers able to prescribe/administer MAT. For Medicare patients, the Part B physician benefit does not cover methadone treatment and the Part D pharmaceutical benefit does not cover it either, as it is administered by a medical professional. CMS should send a letter to state health officials requesting that state Medicaid programs cover all FDA-approved MAT drugs for OUD.

Additionally, all FDA-approved MAT should be offered by authorized providers, not just one or two of these approved options. These decisions of which (if any) MAT to be used must be based upon what is best for the patient, not what is best for the provider. This can be mandated by the Executive Branch.

Finally, we urge you to instruct the NIH to begin to immediately work with the pharmaceutical industry in two areas; the development of additional MAT options and the development of new, non-opioid pain relievers based on research to clarify the biology of pain. The nation needs more options to treat those already addicted and can help to prevent addiction in the first place by avoiding the prescription of opioids. The NIH is best positioned, in our opinion, to lead this effort with industry partners.

But neither Trump nor Price mentioned MAT yesterday. In fact, Price attacked MAT as “substituting one opioid for another” in a listening session earlier this summer, reflecting the very ignorance the commission sought to counter, and drawing a rebuke from hundreds of public health practitioners.

Trump and his team also had few words for the multiple “poisoners of communities” in the pharmaceutical supply chain who started the flow to patients. This is seen as a primary gateway to substance abuse; Trump’s own FDA Commissioner said last month, “most people who become addicted to opioids are medically addicted.” (That’s sloppy wording; plenty of patients who are dependent on pain medication are not addicted anymore than a dialysis patient is addicted to her treatment.)

While several states have sued drug manufacturers and suppliers, most recently New Hampshire, for enabling the crisis by downplaying the risks of addiction from the products they aggressively marketed, HHS Secretary Price said the administration has not taken a position on the cases. “Some have analogized it to the tobacco issue and the master settlement,” Price added, citing an agreement between cigarette makers and 46 states in 1998. “Whether there is something that’s analogous to that, I don’t know.”

In other words, for the Trump administration, the perps are on street corners but not in Big Pharma’s corporate boardrooms.

Price did vow that the administration would mount a comprehensive strategy to deal with the epidemic. He cited making the overdose-reversal medication naloxone “as present as needed and possible anywhere across the country,” boosting research on an addiction vaccine at the National Institutes of Health, and ensuring doctors are not over-prescribing opioid painkillers. White House Counselor Kellyanne Conway highlighted better education about pain medication for medical professionals.

All of these mirror recommendations from the commission.

However, the lack of concrete policy announcements from Trump, despite widespread consensus going back to last year’s Surgeon General report on what can be done, has disappointed public health experts. So has the Trump administration’s more prominent policy on opioids thus far: slashing public health budgets and attempting to gut Medicaid, which pays for the treatment of a large chunk of opioid abusers.

Asked whether he still wants to cut Medicaid given its importance in fighting the epidemic, Price said, “Nobody is interested in cutting Medicaid.” Of course, in June Price insisted that nearly $1 trillion in Medicaid reductions proposed in the Senate healthcare bill is not a cut.

The moment that made the most news during Trump’s much-hyped opioid briefing was, instead, an answer he gave to a question about North Korea.

]]>http://uproxx.com/news/trumps-opioid-commission-80s-drug-war-nostalgia/feed/11trump-feat-uproxx.jpguproxxinterceptIs Donald Trump Tweeting The U.S. Into A War With North Korea?http://uproxx.com/news/trump-tweet-war-north-korea/
http://uproxx.com/news/trump-tweet-war-north-korea/#commentsMon, 07 Aug 2017 18:39:30 +0000http://uproxx.com/?p=400730571

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The political burlesque show running at the White House seems to consume the overwhelming majority of attention among cable news pundits and personalities. Such attention is not entirely unfounded given the potential for criminal indictments to hit members of Donald Trump’s family and inner circle. Any issue or scandal with potential to challenge the viability or very existence of the current presidency deserves intense scrutiny. But the rest of the world still exists and U.S. military involvement in an array of wars and conflicts also demands far more coverage than it receives. This has always been true, including under President Barack Obama, but under Trump, the stakes have been raised dramatically.

Trump has exhibited a disturbing pattern of reckless spontaneity, usually expressed publicly through his Twitter feed, when announcing what could rightly be construed as new U.S. policies. Indeed, when Trump’s senior adviser Sebastian Gorka was asked on Fox News what leverage Trump has left to pressure China to do more to contain potential threats from North Korea, Gorka shot back: “We have, you know, the president’s Twitter feed.”

Perhaps more disturbing than what Trump tweets publicly is what he is telling influential U.S. senators privately. Republican Sen. Lindsey Graham said recently that Trump told him he is willing to militarily obliterate the nation of North Korea if necessary. “There is a military option to destroy North Korea’s program and North Korea itself,” Graham told NBC. Trump, he said, “told me that to my face.”

Trump is doing his best to inflame tensions with North Korea and China. Last weekend, the U.S. flew two B-1 bombers over the Korean Peninsula. It also conducted a ballistic missile test in the region. That followed a July 28 intercontinental ballistic missile test by North Korea. That missile reportedly has a longer range than any previously tested by Pyongyang and in theory, according to experts, could reach the United States. South Korea is now asking the Trump administration for its own new missiles with a capacity to strike deeper into the North. The U.N. Security Council voted unanimously Saturday to impose new sanctions on North Korea over its missile tests and nuclear program.

Trump punctuated the U.S. military posturing against North Korea with a public Twitter attack on China and his American predecessors. “I am very disappointed in China. Our foolish past leaders have allowed them to make hundreds of billions of dollars a year in trade, yet they do NOTHING for us with North Korea, just talk. We will no longer allow this to continue. China could easily solve this problem!”

For its part, China appeared to laugh off Trump as a naïf. “Such a statement could only be made by a greenhorn U.S. president who knows little about the North Korean nuclear issue,” declared an editorial in one Chinese state-controlled newspaper. “Pyongyang is determined to develop its nuclear and missile program and does not care about military threats from the U.S. and South Korea. How could Chinese sanctions change the situation?”

Tensions on the Korean peninsula are not new. And every U.S. administration seems to find itself in a similar conundrum with the regime. But Trump is erratic and tends to just spit out whatever he is thinking. And that could prove very dangerous with nuclear weapons and nuclear powers.

When North Korea is discussed in the U.S. media, coverage largely centers around how unstable and crazy Kim Jung-un is and the utterly repressive nature of his regime. How we got to a point of constant tension is largely ignored.

On this week’s Intercepted podcast, we took a deep dive into the history of North Korea and its leaders with John Feffer, the director of Foreign Policy In Focus at the Institute for Policy Studies. Feffer is the author of several books, including “North Korea/South Korea: U.S. Policy and the Korean Peninsula” and “Power Trip,” which examined U.S. unilateralism during the George W. Bush administration. The following is an expanded transcript of that interview.

JS: Part of the reason I want to talk to you is that I want to step back from the current situation with North Korea and Mike Pence’s visit [to the demilitarized zone in April] and just start with a very basic historical outline, if you could give us that. How did we get to this situation — not just with Kim Jong-un in power — how is it that the Korean Peninsula is divided and what happened in what’s called the Korean War?

JF: Well, even prior to the Korean War, it’s important for folks to understand that the Korean Peninsula has long been subject to outside control, first by the Chinese, and then most notoriously by the Japanese under occupational authority — basically the first half of the 20th century. So WWII and the defeat of Japan meant, for the first time, independence for Korea.

Of course, it also meant division for Korea as the United States and the Soviet Union basically drew a line across the map without regard to anything except the convenience of where they were drawing the line, and divided the peninsula between a zone of influence for the Soviets to the north and a zone of influence for the United States in the south. And both sides, I think, even from the very beginning — both North Korea and South Korea kind of aspired to unify the peninsula under their own control.

And there were also, of course, people who had hoped to unify the peninsula independent of any kind of ideology, a kind of nationalist movement that emerged on the peninsula immediately World War II.

But thereupon began a series of skirmishes, long before even the Korean War broke out in 1950 — jostling for power, essentially — for territory and for authority between a Soviet-aligned north and the U.S.-aligned South. And that brings us up to the Korean War, a kind of miscalculation by North Korea thinking that once they invaded the South, they would not only get the complete backing of the populace in the South, but they would have kind of undiminished support from the Soviet Union and perhaps as well from China.

And the war didn’t necessarily go their way, nor did it go the U.S. and its allies’ way either. It led to a stalemate and the same division, at pretty much the same line in the Korean peninsula, as it was drawn immediately after World War II. That was the stalemate of 1953 and the armistice.

JS: And what was the motivating factor for the United States to get involved in Korea?

JF: Well, that’s a good question, because initially the United States did not see Korea as a national priority. It didn’t fall within its ambit of interests. But they suddenly became very interested in Korea after Mao Tse Tong took over China and installed communist rule there. And a perception emerged that Asia was falling — a falling set of dominoes, that the first domino, of course, was China, following the pattern of the Soviet Union, and then the communist model would continue to propagate, if you will, throughout the region, with Korea being next. Certainly, the North had already fallen under communist influence, but the fear was that that would spread throughout the entire peninsula and then perhaps move farther.

There was concern, for instance, that even Japan — because of radical trade unionists in the country immediately after World War II — Japan, too, could easily go communist. And then, suddenly, the United States would be facing not only the Soviet Union and the emerging Eastern Bloc, but it would be facing a very strong communist bloc in Asia as well, anchored by communist China.

JS: And what happened during the Korean War? I think this is a part of history that a lot of people are not aware of. The United States gets involved and how was that war staged — on a military level and strategic level by the United States? Who was on the side of the U.S.; who were they fighting against; who was backing the North Koreans?

JF: Well, first of all, it technically wasn’t the United States — of course it was the United States — but technically it was a U.N. operation, so it was under the banner of the United Nations. And the United States fought alongside South Korea, as well as some key European allies.

The other factor in there was Japan, which was a very impoverished country after the devastation of World War II. But the Korean War served as a kind of springboard for Japan to jump into the modern industrialized age, if you will. And because Japan served as a staging area for much of the Korean War for the United States, Japan profited enormously, economically, from the war.

On the other side, of course, North Korea had the Soviet Union as its putative ally, although the Soviet Union didn’t really provide all that much support. Much more critical, certainly to North Korea’s survival, was China. But that was only after the United States pushed North Korea all the way up into the northern corner. This was after MacArthur’s landing in Incheon — famous push back up the peninsula by U.S. and South Korean forces.

North Korea was hanging on by a thread. It was, you know, a very small island, all the way up in the northern part of the country — until a million Chinese volunteers entered on the side of North Korea and pushed U.S. forces all the way back down the peninsula, thus leading to the stalemate at roughly what we have as the DMZ today. In terms of military strategy, you saw kind of the first threats to use nuclear weapons by the United States, and of course, the United States was the only country at that time and continues to be the only country to have used nuclear weapons, but you have the first threats to use nuclear weapons against another country.

You also have the use of napalm for the first time. You have wide-scale bombing campaigns in North Korea — very similar, in some sense, to the bombings that took place in Tokyo, in Dresden, during World War II, saturation bombings that led to enormous civilian casualties — so you had some innovations in the Korean War, and you had some continuity as well with World War II.

JS: Now, when you say a million Chinese volunteers — outside of the obvious geostrategic battle that was going on between the United States, China, as you say to an extent, the Soviet Union — what would have been the motivation of a million Chinese to volunteer to go and fight on behalf of or in defense of North Korea?

JF: Well, officially, it was a kind of solidarity action in response to Korean communists’ assistance during the Chinese Communist Revolution. And so there were people like Kim Il-sung — at that time, the first North Korean leader who had operated as a guerrilla in China, but also in support of Chinese communists. So this was, at an explicit level, it was just a kind of repayment. But I think the Chinese government was quite concerned about the possibility that the United States would suddenly have forces stationed along the Chinese border if North Korea were to disappear and South Korea pushed its border all the way up to the border with China. So that, I think, was perhaps the greater motivating factor for China to become involved in the war.

JS: Now you know, of course, Kim Jong-un, the current leader of North Korea, is generally derided in the U.S. press and made fun of and treated as though he is, you know, a fat little lunatic, and of course, particularly with this current administration in the United States, he’s described as kind of a mixture between a porky little brat and a dangerous dictator.

But I want to peel back the layers on the kind of dynasty of the Kim family, starting with Kim Il-sung. How is it that the Kims, particularly Kim Il-sung, achieve this deity-like status within North Korea? Maybe unpack some of the historical context of who Kim Il-sung was and how he came to consolidate the level of power in North Korea that he ultimately did very quickly.

JF: Yeah, that’s an important question, because much of what we understand about North Korea today should be based on our understanding of Kim Il-sung and how he came to power. Because at the end of World War II, when Korea was divided and North Korea was effectively created, Kim Il-sung was not in Korea, he was actually in Russia. He had spent much of the war in the Soviet Union after having effectively lost in his guerrilla struggles in China and in North Korea.

So he spent much of that time in the Soviet Union. He comes back to Korea, basically on Soviet ships, and is effectively installed as the leader of North Korea by the Russians who see him as a pliant client.

But it’s important to realize that at that time, he was quite young. He was, you know, 32, 33, when he comes back to North Korea — quite young by leadership standards in Korea. Korea is a Confucian society; great deference paid to the older members of society. The notion of someone at the age of 33 taking over was kind of a challenge to traditional notions of leadership. Compound that with the fact that when Kim Il-sung came back to Korea, he was facing some significant opposition from indigenous communists, from communists that had spent the time in South Korea during the war, and as well from communists who had spent time in China. So, three different factions.

And he came back with approximately 200 guerrilla fighters. Between 1945 and 1950, the outbreak of the Korean War, Kim Il-sung consolidates his position rather ruthlessly by eliminating all three of these factions and establishing his own guerrilla cohort as the leading faction of society.

That continues during the Korean War. Purges take place as well during the war, and even after the war, and Kim Il-sung emerges from the Korean War having effectively consolidated his political position — gotten rid of his political rivals. And he also learns from the Soviet model the importance of a strong leader — a leader who commands not only the respect of the population but is, in effect, worshiped by the population.

So he merges the idea of a government and personal authority and establishes a personality cult — which becomes extraordinarily important in the development of North Korea because he leads from 1945, 1946, all the way to his death in 1994.

So it’s an extraordinary period of time that he controls the country. And he controls the country in a way that, from an outside perspective, seems quite successful. In other words, if you look at North Korea and South Korea as they emerge from the Korean War, North Korea develops economically much faster than South Korea, seems to develop a much more prosperous country in a shorter period of time using the Soviet-style command-economy strategies.

South Korea, not as successful. This is the case up until approximately the 1970s. So this model that Kim Il-sung develops attains a credibility, a legitimacy, within North Korea, not only on the basis of manufactured reality, if you will, the personality cult, but even by some objective standards, economic standards and social standards.

JS: This cult of personality that you’re talking about and you know it’s akin, I think, in some ways to almost a religion; how did that become commonplace in North Korea? Because that — typically when that happens it’s — you have a society that is cut off from the outside world and you start to tap into the new generations and ensure that they’re kind of brainwashed into believing that this is the truth and this is the way the world is. When did that start in North Korea around Kim Il-sung’s identity?

JF: Well Kim Il-sung came from a very Christian family and North Korea was — or the northern part of Korea was — very strongly Christian during the late 19th and early 20th century.

In fact, Pyongyang was really the center of Christian theology. Many people came to Pyongyang to study, including Billy Graham’s wife studied in Pyongyang at the theology center there, which was why Billy Graham was so interested in North Korea. So, Kim Il-sung bases his cult of personality on Christian roots. It’s kind of like what Christianity did in strengthening itself by building itself on an earlier pre-Christian Roman or other kind of pagan rituals. So you have, for instance, the father and the mother and the son. Kim Il-sung, his first wife and their first son, Kim Jong-il, formed this kind of Trinity in the North Korean ideology, very similar to a Christian Trinity.

And you find that Kim Il-sung, through this period, is able to add on to this cult of personality with some indigenous aspects. I mean, of course, it was identified as a Communist country, but gradually over the decades, those communist elements become superseded by more nationalist elements. And of course, the ideology that many people are familiar with is the Juche, an ideology that Kim Il-sung developed, which is effectively a self-reliant ideology — says that North Korea really can’t depend on other countries. And that’s why at the top of the show, I mentioned that it’s important to know that Korea was subjugated by outside forces for hundreds of years: China, Japan, etc.

So, the notion of self-reliance of nationalist sovereignty — extremely important to the North Korean ideology. And Kim Il-sung graphs this onto the personality cult, so that you have a rich kind of nationalist underpinning.

So it’s not just Kim Il-sung. It’s Kim Il-sung’s kind of merging with the nation as a whole to create a kind of organic, one mind-one body ideology, if you will.

JS: And, and from that period that you’re describing where North Korea was, let’s just say, simply, it was more advanced than — advancing quicker than — South Korea. Take us from that period through the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1990, and then the ultimate ascent to power of Kim Jong-il following the death of Kim Il-sung in 1994. What happened from the ’70s up to the fall of the Soviet Union?

JF: Well, North Korea with its kind of Juche ideology decides not to integrate into the Soviet Comecon, or the economic cooperation sphere of the Soviet Union. It also doesn’t tie itself inextricably to the Chinese economy; the Chinese economy actually wasn’t doing very well in the 1960s and 1970s.

It establishes itself as a kind of indigenous autonomous economy and it also does not take much in the way of foreign loans. It does take some, but it doesn’t integrate itself into the global capitalistic economy either.

So it is isolated from both the East and the West. South Korea, of course, makes its decision to become a, a very globalized economy. It will base its economy on trade, on exports, on its integration into the world economy. So that decision that was made both in the North and the South in the 1970s leads to a pretty extreme divergence in economic performance in North Korea. Because it’s not connected really to any other economic bloc, cannot compete really, it cannot generate enough, you know, autonomous, indigenous capacity to meet the needs of its population.

South Korea advances very rapidly, you know, from the 1960s — South Korea was basically at the level of a sub-Saharan African country. And within the space of one generation, South Korea becomes one of the top industrial powers in the world. So this divergence is quite dramatic and it’s really exaggerated or aggravated by the collapse of communism because, basically, you know what — where North Korea was successful it was successful because it was running on cheap oil. North Korea had, for instance, the most mechanized agriculture in the region, which is quite remarkable when you think of it because you know Japan was quite an advanced country and had advanced agricultural techniques. But North Korea was the one that really was using much more oil, fertilizer in order to boost its food production. But that whole system was based on cheap oil — cheap oil either provided in at subsidized rates by the Soviet Union or China.

When [the] Soviet Union collapses in ’91, when China decides to go on, to eliminate the subsidized prices and go to world market rates for energy, suddenly North Korea faces an enormous crisis. Everything that was based on cheap oil suddenly becomes prohibitively expensive. It becomes impossible, in fact, for North Korean agriculture to survive and its industrial capacity also drops, since it too is based largely on cheap energy. And so, you see this hit in the early ’90s. And then by 1993-1994, all it took was a little push. And that little push was floods and droughts — weather conditions, in other words — that tipped North Korea over the edge.

And so by 1995, North Korean agriculture had collapsed — its industry had collapsed, it could no longer feed its population — and it enters into the famine period, and that comes right after Kim Il-sung’s death in 1994. So, for a lot of people, this was, you know, a sign of the heaven’s displeasure with North Korean leadership.

Kim Il-sung dies, the country’s plunged into crisis, the famine kills a lot of people. We don’t know how many — as much as 10 percent of the population of approximately 25 million people in North Korea — but it’s still difficult to find estimates, a famine that lasts from approximately 1995 to 2000.

And then you also in this period, you have Kim Il-sung’s son, Kim Jong-il, take over. Someone who you ho you could say never really wanted to be the leader of a country. I mean, here was a guy who was much more comfortable behind the camera. I think he wanted to be a film director. He loved films. He had this enormous private library of movies. If he could have just sat in a movie theater all day long, he would have been a happy guy. But he’s thrust into this position that I don’t think he ever wanted, and he certainly wasn’t, he didn’t have the capacity for. He was not charismatic. He barely uttered any word in public. He didn’t have a kind of a notion of where he should take the country economically

He did know that he shouldn’t listen to the Chinese or the Russians because this was, you know, the legacy of his father. It should be indigenous. It should be autonomous. It should be nationalist. But he doesn’t really take the country in an important new direction. He manages by 2000-2001 to stabilize the country, but it’s been knocked backward significantly, and North Korea, you could say it really hasn’t recovered from that period of the 1990s. Even today, I mean, and it has a modest economic growth, but it really, you take a tour of the North Korean countryside and you know it’s still because of the, because energy is expensive, it looks futile, it looks like people you know pushing plows instead of tractors.

It’s, it’s an industry industrial infrastructure that doesn’t have consistent electricity. And so, the factories aren’t working at peak capacity. So it’s still suffering from the problems it faced in the ’90s.

JS: Well also, John, I mean, another key component of this is that in the mid-1990s, or I guess around 1995, the North Koreans begin to invest more heavily in nuclear power in part to try to offset what you’re describing from the evaporation of their cheap fuel supplies from Russia or the Soviet Union, and also then, you know, facing a depletion of their economic prospects or positive economic prospects.

Was, was it actually the case that the nuclear aspirations of North Korea started from that position? Or was it always dual-hatted with a military aim?

JF: Yeah I think it was always two-pronged. As you point out, it was necessary for North Korea to find some other fuel source and nuclear power seemed a very attractive alternative. South Korea was investing enormous amount into nuclear power, it had the example of Japan, which also relied heavily on nuclear. North Korea kind of saw itself is following in that in those footsteps.

But there was a military component as well. Because at the same time that North Korea and South Korea were roughly equal economically up until the ’70s, you could argue that they were roughly equal militarily as well. But from the 1970s on, in part because of South Korea’s economic success and the fact it could invest more money into the military, and in part because it had the United States, as an ally, and the U.S. was providing cutting edge technology in the military sector, North Korea fell behind rather rapidly. It had a large standing army. It had large artillery positions, facing Seoul. It could do a lot of damage to South Korea, no question about it but the edge had clearly gone to South Korea and U.S.-South Korea combined, to level the playing field, well, to have a nuclear capability that was perceived as a cheap way of coming up to speed essentially. Even though, you know we know that nuclear weapons are not cheap, when you look at all of the costs combined, but looked at narrowly from the North Korean perspective they thought that was that was a kind of quick fix, if you will.

And they were also concerned of course that the United States was, you know, invading other countries around the world and it was kind of taking advantage of the unipolar moment that happened after the collapse of the Soviet Union, so nuclear weapons was not, were not just a way of leveling the playing field with South Korea but they offered a real deterrent against any possible U.S. intervention. Either bombing or actual physical military intervention in the country.

JS: But on some level, you know, just speaking from a strategic perspective, it was smart on the part of the North Koreans to want to pursue nuclear weapons given that they watched what happened in World War II. But also the fact that, in the emerging nuclear world, countries with nuclear weapons seem to have at least some form of an insurance policy from their complete destruction?

JF: Absolutely. No I mean the North Korean decision, from the perspective of North Korea, was absolutely the right one. If they had not developed nuclear weapons, North Korea probably would not exist today and — and that’s an important consideration when we think about what kind of negotiations can solve the current conflict between the United States and North Korea as well as between North Korea and South Korea.

If nuclear weapons serve this critical deterrent function, why on earth would North Korea give them up? Would they give them up simply in exchange for a peace treaty to replace the armistice that ended the Korean War? Well, I mean, North Korea has asked for a peace treaty, and, and certainly there are a lot of folks here in the United States and in South Korea that support peace treaty, but honestly a piece of paper is probably not going to substitute for a nuclear deterrent.

So we have to come up with different kinds of security guarantees in the process of negotiating with North Korea, as well as acknowledging that A) North Korea’s not going to give up its nuclear capability as a precondition for negotiations, which was of course the Obama administration’s articulated position, and they’re not going to give away that nuclear capability after, say, only a week of negotiations and they say, “Hey, you know, you guys convinced us. We really believe in your sincerity. Thank you for your offers of removing sanctions. We’ll get rid of our nuclear weapons.” No! I mean they’re not going to trust us after a week of negotiations. It’s going to take a while for this trust-building exercise to have any kind of impact on the size and the technical qualifications of North Korea’s nuclear capability.

JS: Now I want to ask you two questions that I think are really vital and I don’t think that they’re all that often asked, and in part the answers are probably very complicated or incomplete, but I’m going to ask them anyway given your experience both in Korea and studying Korea for as long as you have. The first is: who really is in control of North Korea, because it’s hard to believe, particularly now, that Kim Jong-un is actually the one in charge in North Korea?

And then the other part of it is to what extent are the horror stories that we hear about the regime’s treatment of its own people within the country true? We had this, this case where there were these reports that Kim Jong-un had you know his uncle who was a military figure eaten alive by dogs, and now it seems like that’s completely untrue, but it still sticks, so the first part of it is, who really is in control in North Korea?

JF: Well that the easy answer is: I don’t know. And the second answer is nobody really knows outside of North Korea. The regime has always been opaque in terms of its decision making. We know that there are two power centers: military and the party. They overlap and a successful leader is going to have a foot in both camps, but there’s also going to be some disagreement over policy.

I’ll give you an example. The case on industrial complex, it was an economic complex located just north of the DMZ, it was run by South Korean managers with South Korean companies, but the workforce was North Korea. And this was a kind of innovative economic project that was established during the sunshine period of Kim Dae-jung and Roh Moo-hyun, South Korean leaders. And it ran up and told me about a year or two ago was closed down by Park Geun-hye.

But in North Korea, in order to get that project green-lighted, well there were basically two different approaches. I mean one faction, the military faction, said, “Hey, that’s an important military route, we’re not going to establish an industrial center in this important route that allows us to potentially invade North Korea, South Korea or defend against a South Korean assault. And you’re just going to put this economic complex there? That doesn’t make any military sense.” And another faction that said, “Hey you know this is really great economic advantage to us and potentially you know, it builds some kind of relationship with the South that also could down the line prove advantageous to us.”

Economic reformers effectively won the day, and the industrial complex was built so you have that kind of factionalism inside North Korea even though there are no official factions. I mean there are no political parties, we haven’t really identified any kind of political, ideological blocs within the party or within the military. All of that’s quite opaque. I mean, we only find out about it after the fact, for instance, when, you know, Kim Il-sung put down a rebellion by military officers or executed a group of people that then later became associated with a political faction.

Kim Jong-un, as you said, got rid of his uncle, Jang Song-thaek, didn’t have him eaten by dogs, but you know, still, kind of brutal the way he killed him. Jang Song-thaek, well, it’s possible he represented a different faction, a faction more aligned with China, aligned with economic reform inside North Korea, but also aligned with Jang Song-thaek lining his own pockets as a result of his relationship with China. But whatever, however you want to interpret it was definitely a center of power that Kim Jong-un felt uncomfortable with and we’ve seen over the last five, six years his, as, as his grandfather did, his a limitation of all potential rival.

Does that mean that Kim Jong-un is the number one decision maker in North Korea today? Well, according to official ideology and according to, you know, a lot of experts looking at North Korea, well he does seem like he’s number one, but we can’t say that with any 100 percent degree of certainty.

JS: But you know John, I, I have to say, when I watch, you know, the propaganda footage out of North Korea and you see Kim Jong-un walking around and he’s got all of these generals and other military figures with their chests filled with all of their medals, I can’t help but wonder when I look at that stuff like, what the hell do these guys think that having to walk around with this, this kid and act like he’s just this uber-genius? Like why wouldn’t the gang of them get together and just sort of say, “We all think this is crazy, right?”

I mean yes you point out that they could be killed in a horrifying way, but I just have to think that there, there, there must be some basic consensus where they all kind of look at each other and they’re like, “Yeah this is really effed up that we have to be around this kid and act like he’s God incarnate.”

JF: Yeah and that, and that in fact could be a scenario we see in the future. I mean I don’t see for instance democracy taking over in North Korea, but there is a good possibility that we would see a military coup and the generals ultimately deciding that Kim Jong-un doesn’t know what he’s talking.

JS: But then aren’t there are people that think, that truly are kind of brainwashed, they were born into this, it’s all they know, what they’ve been told about the outside world is completely nuts. I mean is part of it that, “Yeah we, this, this is like a really nutty little kid that we have to be bowing down to here, but if we were to whack him there’d be an insurrection because everyone somehow thinks he’s god”?

JF: No I don’t think at this point that’s the case. I mean we don’t have obviously access to North Koreans to do public polling or anything like that but we do know from defectors and there are about 30,000 defectors in South Korea, as well as occasional polls done of North Koreans in China to find out what they’re thinking, and their allegiance to the regime is not nowhere near as strong as it was under Kim Il-sung, or even Kim Jong-il.

In other words, the charismatic authority that established the North Korean regime has effectively evaporated. The reason why people obey is not so much that they’re brainwashed, but really out of fear. The North Korean regime has an extraordinarily extensive surveillance system that requires, for instance that three people report on any one person in the neighborhood and that those three reports are then triangulated to make sure that not only did the person who’s being surveilled not say anything inappropriate, but even that the three people who are doing the surveillance, to make sure that all of their observations conform to one another, to make sure that they are on track as well.

So you have this incredibly intricate, interlocking surveillance system that makes it extremely difficult for any dissent to take root. I mean everybody is afraid that, you know, even their family members might give them away, or their friends might give them away, because, you know, it’s survival.

But your second question was, you know, to what extent are these stories of human rights abuses true. And I would say that, yes, there are some that are not true, that have been fabricated, but for the most part we have enough evidence to suggest that the regime has maintained pretty horrific labor camp conditions. It has engaged in summary executions on a regular basis.

But we have to remember that this is, this applies to only a small percentage of the population. I mean it’s as if you know you would ask your average American about, you know, solitary confinement in prisons. They might know of it but they wouldn’t necessarily know anybody who had been in solitary confinement and they would say well it really doesn’t affect me personally, or my pocketbook, and it certainly doesn’t mean that the United States is a human rights-abusing country.

There are lots of people in North Korea who have very little connection to what’s going on in the labor camps. They are worried about it. They’re worried they might end up there, but they go about their life in a pretty normal way, you know they go to work, they do their job, they keep their head low, and they hope things will change. And it’s so there’s a there’s a big discrepancy between the horrifying conditions that take place in the prison camps, and your everyday existence, especially in Pyongyang, which is a kind of a city of the elite anyway.

JS: Right, and that’s part of the nuance that I think is often lost when you listen to, well, now there’s instant-ready experts on Korea that are on TV because of the Trump administration’s posturing, but you know it is described as basically like every single person in the country is in prison and on a daily basis having their rights heinously violated. And I think that they’re, that the impression given is not simply that they live in a military dictatorship and that is akin to being in prison, but that the prison labor camps is how the entire country is functioning. I think you could get that impression from watching particularly corporate cable news coverage.

But I wanted to ask you how — how do these — how do the North Korean leaders get their money? Like what is fueling the largesse among the elites like where does the money come from that the North Korean elite government, the military has?

JF: Well of course the North Korean economy does exist and so you know the North Korean government can extract a certain amount of money from the industrial and agricultural production that goes on. But I would say the most money would come from other sources. So for instance, the Chinese government is pretty heavily invested in North Korea, especially the northern part of North Korea. North Korea has a lot of mineral wealth, it has coal, it has gold, it has rare earth materials and China is invested in extracting that, those materials and of course the money is produced by that and that money flows upward as well.

Beyond China, of course, North Korea is notorious for engaging in the international economy in the only way that it can — in other words, because of sanctions, because of other restrictions placed on the North Korean economy, North Korea cannot participate in capitalism as it would like to, and instead, it kind of does so in a gray market or black market ways. In the past it has certainly engaged in drug production and drug sales. Its embassy officials throughout the world have been arrested kicked out of countries for engaging in all sorts of contraband activities, from selling alcohol and cigarettes to actually trafficking in like rhino horns.

So there is money from that. And then I would say finally that there are kind of newer ways of making money in the cyber sphere. So for instance, there’s some evidence that North Korea has been hacking into banks to just withdraw money that way. And again, you could say, well this is the way any country would react if it was denied entry in a legitimate way from the global economy, well it would have to find a back door. Perhaps if it is given an opportunity to operate legitimately in the global economy, it will behave legitimately. But that of course is something to be tested.

JS: Now I want to go to the present and talk about the position that the Trump administration there, the emerging position, of course we had Vice President Mike Pence just at the DMZ, the demilitarized zone, and he reiterated what Secretary of State Rex Tillerson said on his recent visit to South Korea, which is that the era of strategic patience is over. And Pence actually said that we’re putting the North Koreans on notice regarding their nuclear weapons. What’s your read on how the Trump administration’s public posture is being received in Pyongyang, and what this could lead to?

JF: Well, the Trump administration comes in like pretty much every previous administration in its policy toward North Korea saying that what his predecessors did failed, and he’s going to do a better job. So of course Obama said that. George W. Bush said that, even Clinton said that. So that’s nothing new. Obama positioned for eight years with strategic patience. It failed, I mean failed obviously, there were no successful negotiations with the exception of the Leap Day agreement that lasted for about a day and a half.

And North Korea continued to build up its nuclear capabilities, so it’s quite obvious that it failed. And then the Trump administration has discovered as all other administrations did previously that, yes, it’s easy to say that the previous government’s position was a failure, but it’s really difficult to come up with a more successful alternative.

Trump initially said that he would, as previous administrations said, outsource the problem to the Chinese, get China to solve this problem for the United States. And that of course fails on any number of counts. Number one China does not do the bidding of the United States on foreign policy issues, and number two China doesn’t have that kind of influence in Pyongyang, Pyongyang assiduously avoids any kind of dependency relationship from China with China and spurns all of China’s advice. for the most part.

So failing that, of course Trump realize that he couldn’t rely on the Chinese, he tried something else, we’ll do it ourselves. But what does that mean? Well it could mean tighter economic sanctions, it could mean a pre-emptive military strike, it could mean negotiations.

Well the Trump administration conducted its own strategic review of North Korea policy. The conclusion was that a pre-emptive military strike was wrong on probably every conceivable count, that it would be catastrophic for the United States and even more so for South Korea and Japan, and of course North Korea and China. And so that leaves tighter economic sanctions and negotiations. And I think we got both of those coming out of the administration right now, with Pence dangling the possibility of negotiations in his recent visit.

How it’s received? Well of course South Korea’s tremendously anxious about any possible attack on North Korea because, of course, the South Koreans would suffer the consequences. North Korean missiles can’t reach the United States, could barely reach Japan — China, South Korea would bear virtually the entire brunt of North Korea’s attack. So they don’t want that obviously.

Pyongyang — well, Pyongyang’s reaction was to have a missile display on the anniversary of Kim Il-sung’s birthday. And so they trotted out as many missiles as they could find, even if they are not operational, to send a signal that they are ready for any kind of attack. And if the United States were foolish enough to try to take out North Korea’s nuclear testing site, they would respond in kind.

And so that, I think, is where we’re heading. We have you know kind of the usual steps towards escalation, that every kind of initial government, new administration the United States faces with North Korea. My hope is that the Trump administration recognizes that, OK, tighter economic sanctions is one possibility but frankly we’ve tried that and it hasn’t really worked.

But negotiations, well they have worked, and it worked in 1994, even worked during the George W. Bush administration with the six-party talks. Both of those agreements lead to effective freezes and even some dismantlement of North Korea’s nuclear capability. So that’s the no-brainer as far as I’m concerned, it’s just a question of whether the Trump administration comes to that realization as well.

JS: Or, if there’s actually like sane people, you know, running the show. I do think that when we talk about Bush and Cheney, you know, there’s a particular form of heinousness that came with the neoconservatives, but on some levels, they were kind of competent and within the accepted discourse in Washington, D.C. I have my own critical analysis of that and both parties play into it but with Trump we really are, I think, in a bit of a different universe.

As we see through his Twitter feed, and my concern is not that someone like Mattis who’s the defense secretary would say, “Oh yeah, let’s do a pre-emptive first strike against North Korea.” But that’s some of the kind of shadow nuts that are, are around this administration including some very decorated retired U.S. military figures, we’ve been hearing that they’re they are pushing for that and, and hopefully that’s just a minority voice but I do think there is a unique kind of cause for concern with this administration versus even the Bush-Cheney crowd and I’m curious if you want to push back on that if you agree or, some different version?

JF: Well, I would agree to a certain extent, but I would I would say that the Bush administration, for basically six years, took a pretty hostile attitude toward North Korea, and we came pretty close to escalation as a result of, frankly, the ideologues within the Bush administration. Cheney, the inclusion of North Korea in the Axis of Evil, Cheney’s statement that, “We don’t negotiate with evil, we defeat evil.” The refusal to deal with North Korea at —

JS: Well, and John Bolton.

JF: And John Bolton. Absolutely. So you know we did have a kind of ascendancy of the ideologues for the first, first term and then even the first couple years of the second term before some career diplomats took over. In this case, Chris Hill who had been posted variety of places, later in Iraq but in Poland and Macedonia, people like Victor Cha, who I disagreed with on Korea policy, you know, before he entered the Bush administration, but I think he went through a kind of sea change in his understanding of North Korea as a result of seeing what the ideological position coming from the neocons was.

And so he’s like, “Ah, well I do think we can we can negotiate with North Korea after all.” And then persuading Condoleezza Rice to take that position at the highest level.

With the Trump administration, yes, absolutely, you know there are you know people like Steve Bannon who, you know, have a very fixed nationalist perspectives and the real question is, you know, you know, for the Bush administration was six years, it took six years before a different policy bubbled up from below we don’t have that kind of time and I trust we don’t have Two terms for the Trump administration, for such a policy come up six years from now and we’re seeing some indications of the sidelining of the worst types of ideologues. Of course kicking Bannon off the principal’s committee and the National Security Council, sending K.T. McFarland off to Singapore.

You know, maybe we’re seeing some accelerated version of what happened during the Bush years in which the ideologues are pushed to the sidelines a little bit more quickly and maybe we will see you know a kind of pragmatist, a pragmatic approach to North Korea emerge much more quickly than it did during those years.

JS: And, as we wrap up here, I’m curious your take on what happened, we don’t know exactly what Barack Obama said to Donald Trump, but it was reported that he basically scared the shit out of Trump when he brought up North Korea, as they had their meeting. Do we have reason to be afraid of North Korea right now and what would you imagine was the content of what Barack Obama actually said to Donald Trump?

JF: Well, I suspect that Obama said to Trump something similar to what Bush said to him during the transition. And Bush, we know, said two things. He asked Obama please to keep two programs in place, and that was the drone program and the Stuxnet program, the kind of hacking of Iran’s centrifuges that set back their nuclear program.

And Obama said, “OK, I mean there are other things going to change.” But Obama held to those two positions. In this go-round I suspect that Obama said, “Please stick to the drone program.” Because Obama, you know, was very much in favor of that and I suspect he said something similar about a comparable program with North Korea’s nuclear program. In other words, a kind of hacking of the code there that has, from all reports, impeded North Korea’s success rate with its missile launches.

I think he also probably said that North Korea is a significant problem that Trump cannot avoid it, cannot ignore it. And you know whether, whether that’s effective, you know, you know, it’s hard to know what gets through to Trump. It’s certainly not policy advice. Certainly special pleading gets through to him from Jared Kushner or his daughter.

JS: Fox and Friends, John. Fox and Friends is the single most important source of information for this White House.

JF: (laughing) That’s true. So —

JS: But the point I’m getting at is do we have something to, do we actually have something to fear from North Korea? And when I say “we,” I don’t mean necessarily the United States, but that’s how things get covered here, we always ask how does it affect us personally? But, my sense, and I am not by any stretch of the imagination an expert on Korea, I’ve never been, I’ve never reported on it. So I’m asking this I think with a lot of other people as well — my sense is you know if we don’t swap the hornet’s nest, the chances that North Korea is going to just attack the United States or even South Korea is basically nonexistent. Am I wrong in that or is there fearmongering that’s going on?

JF: No, I think you’re basically correct. North Korea, you know as you said at the start of the show, the representation of Kim Jong-un as a kind of tyrannical brat or an infant who has no rational goals is incorrect. Number one rational goal for Kim Jong-un is preservation of his own authority and the preservation of his system of government. He knows that any attack of South Korea or the United States would spell the end of North Korea as a country, and of course, by extension the end of him and his regime. So pure self-preservation dictates that, no, North Korea is not going to engage in any kind of attack on a sovereign country.

On the other hand, just as we fear that Donald Trump might do something entirely unexpected because he’s listening to Fox and Friends, or he has developed some you know, hobbyhorse notion about a country that he might indulge in some entirely irrational act that would be shooting the United States in the foot and undercutting his own political authority.

But he would do it anyway because you know, he doesn’t think about these things. It is conceivable that Kim Jong-un would do something similar. I would put that in a very remote, you know, set of possibilities. But I wouldn’t you know just exclude it entirely. I would say, you know, I’m not worried about North Korea in that way but there is this kind of, you know, if North Korea is pushed against to the wall, if it feels like it has absolutely no other choice, that the system — its system — is on the brink of collapse anyway and it’s being threatened by both South Korea and the United States and Japan and the only way out of that seems to be a military approach, well it is not inconceivable that they would go that route.

JS: OK, John, really quick, a speed round here: Who is more likely to use a nuclear weapon, Donald Trump or Kim Jong-un? Brief answer, please.

JS: Who spends more time on their hair each morning: Kim Jong-un or Donald Trump?

JF: That’s a good question. I mean probably, you know Donald Trump because he’s older and his hair requires that kind of care.

JS: Whose suits are more expensive: Donald Trump or Kim Jong-un?

JF: Definitely Donald Trump. Absolutely.

JS: Are both Kim Jong-un and Donald Trump’s suits made in China?

JF: (laughs). Not the North Korean I mean Kim Jong-un is either going to get suits from the West or they’re going to be produced by the vinyl lawn factories inside North Korea.

JS: OK, well we’re going to give you — your prize is on the way, it’s an amazing North Korean car it runs totally on Juche.

JF: That’s fabulous and is this going to be delivered by Amazon drone?

JS: It is yes, we’re, we’re trying to, we’re trying to have our own peace settlement here between Trump and Kim Jong-un, and I think we’ve figured it out, John. John Feffer, thanks for being with us on Intercepted.

]]>http://uproxx.com/news/trump-tweet-war-north-korea/feed/4twitter-war-feat-uproxx.jpguproxxinterceptRepublicans Got Good At Symbolic Repeals Of Obamacare, But Flinched When Faced With Realityhttp://uproxx.com/news/gop-repeal-obamacare-symbol-flinch/
http://uproxx.com/news/gop-repeal-obamacare-symbol-flinch/#commentsFri, 28 Jul 2017 18:37:00 +0000http://uproxx.com/?p=400713827

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Before the Affordable Care Act had even been signed into law, congressional Republicans were promising to veto it. Those solemn vows continued throughout the 2010 midterms, helping Republicans take back the House in the tea party wave.

They used that position of power to pass repeal after repeal after repeal — and to point at the Democratic-controlled Senate as an obstacle to be overcome.

In 2014 they finally took the upper chamber back. With unified control of Congress, in 2015 they sent President Obama a full repeal of Obamacare. He vetoed it. The message to activists was clear: Republicans needed to control the White House, too.

In 2016, they took the White House. And then things got real.

With the prospect of repeal actually becoming law, the House blinked in March, and Speaker Paul Ryan pulled his repeal-and-replace bill from the House floor. As flawed as the Affordable Care Act was and is, repeal would throw millions off of health insurance and drive up premiums. Republicans had nothing better to replace it with, largely because the ACA was originally a Heritage-devised concept to begin with. “Obamacare is the law of the land,” Ryan acknowledged.

Not so fast, said President Trump, never one to worry about real-world consequences. Entirely divorced from the policy discussion, Trump looked only at the politics of failure and recoiled. He piled on the House Freedom Caucus, blaming them for a loss that had many fathers. And so the Freedom Caucus said fine, we’ll vote for something and send it to the Senate, where it’ll die.

The premise behind the renewed effort in the House to pass a bill was always that: the Senate will fix whatever we do, so don’t worry about the details of what’s in ours. For the House, it felt a bit like Obama was back in the White House, with his veto pen the blankie that Republicans needed to take legislative nap. As long as voting was a dream, it was doable.

But still he demanded a vote. The promises to lawmakers that they were not really making law grew more explicit. Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., promised moderates that Medicaid cuts they opposed would never actually be implemented. Somehow, that wasn’t enough, and Republicans in the center and the right revolted, the final nails being driven in simultaneously by Sens. Mike Lee of Utah and Jerry Moran of Kansas — with Moran demanding the process start over and make sure to address pre-existing conditions.

It had become blindingly clear by that point that Republicans were not willing to vote for a repeal bill that could become law. Nevertheless, Trump persisted.

The demands for a fantasy vote grew even more extreme. McConnell pushed his colleagues to vote for something — anything — just to get the bill to a conference committee, so that the two chambers could work something up and bring it back for a vote.

So he held a vote to bring the bill to the floor, with assurances that both of the party’s major projects — repeal and repeal-and-replace — would fail on the floor.

With a tie-breaking vote from Vice President Mike Pence, he succeeded, winning a day of headlines about GOP momentum, even as the votes on repeal themselves went down badly.

After dispatching with repeal and repeal-and-replace in not-close-votes, the Senate moved on to “skinny repeal” — a repeal of just a wee bit of Obamacare, just enough to get 50 votes and move to conference committee, where, somehow, the fundamental dynamics that had blocked repeal would somehow be overcome.

But wait, asked Senate Republicans, what if we pass something — and it actually becomes law? It was too much to contemplate.

Sens. Lindsey Graham, Ron Johnson, John McCain and Bill Cassidy held a press conference Thursday night in the Capitol demanding full assurance from the House that the lower chamber would not, under any circumstances, take up the bill they planned to pass and send it to the White House. If the Senate could be assured it would go to conference committee instead, they promised, then they would support it.

To be clear: they demanded a public promise that the bill they were voting for would never become law in order to agree to vote for it.

The promise Ryan offered was less than a promise. “If moving forward requires a conference committee, that is something the House is willing to do,” he offered in a late-night statement.

But he had a condition: the Senate needed to put up. Eventually. “We expect the Senate to act first on whatever the conference committee produces,” Ryan insisted.

In other words, fine, vote for your sham bill. But when the conference committee creates one more sham, y’all have to vote on it first, proving to the American people — and, more importantly, to Trump — that it is the Senate that doesn’t have the votes. Never mind that the House didn’t have the votes, either, when they thought it was real.

McCain, who returned to the Senate after a brain-cancer diagnosis to cast the dramatic vote McConnell needed to get the bill on the floor, put it as well as anybody could. Walking on to the Senate floor for the critical vote, he told reporters, “Watch the show.”

McCain joined with Susan Collins an Lisa Murkowski to give the chamber just enough votes to kill it, 51-49.

Tech companies like Facebook and Google that have become essential elements of 21st century life should be regulated as utilities, top White House adviser Steve Bannon has argued, according to three people who’ve spoken to him about the issue.

Bannon’s push for treating essential tech platforms as utilities pre-dates the Democratic “Better Deal” that was released this week. “Better Deal,” the branding for Democrats’ political objectives, included planks aimed at breaking up monopolies in a variety of sectors, suggesting that anti-monopoly politics is on the rise on both the right and left.

Bannon’s basic argument, as he has outlined it to people who’ve spoken with him, is that Facebook and Google have become effectively a necessity in contemporary life. Indeed, there may be something about an online social network or a search engine that lends itself to becoming a natural monopoly, much like a cable company, a water and sewer system, or a railroad. The sources recounted the conversations on the condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to give the accounts on record, and could face repercussions for doing so.

Regulating a company as a utility does not mean that the government controls it, but rather that it is much more tightly regulated in what it is able to do and prices it is able to charge. And it doesn’t mean every element of the company would be regulated in that way. For Google — which now calls itself Alphabet and has already conveniently broken itself up into discrete elements — it may only be the search function that would be regulated like a utility.

Under the Obama administration, the Federal Communications Commission moved forward on a plan to regulate internet service providers as utilities, barring them from slowing down traffic to a site in order to pressure it into paying higher fees. The Trump administration is pushing to reverse that move, which complicates Bannon’s message.

Bannon’s argument is bolstered by an unlikely player: Facebook founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg. For years, Zuckerberg routinely described Facebook as a “social utility.” In an interview in 2007 with Time magazine, he was asked to elaborate on what had become a central talking point.

TIME: Why do you describe Facebook as a “social utility” rather than a “social network?”

Zuckerberg: I think there’s confusion around what the point of social networks is. A lot of different companies characterized as social networks have different goals — some serve the function of business networking, some are media portals. What we’re trying to do is just make it really efficient for people to communicate, get information and share information. We always try to emphasize the utility component.

The emphasis on the utility component has disappeared now that Zuckerberg is surrounded by lawyers well versed in monopoly laws, but the argument is as resonant today — in fact, more so — than it was a decade ago.

Tech companies, meanwhile, have feuded publicly with the administration, particularly over its decision to back out of the Paris climate accord, a move driven by Bannon.

Silicon Valley’s liberal cultural politics puts it at odds occasionally with more conservative, rural Trump voters. Facebook was confronted by a backlash over its news curating during last year’s presidential campaign. With insiders claiming there was an anti-conservative bias, Facebook pulled its live team off the project. Instead the social media giant turned its curation over to an algorithm that had little ability to detect whether an article had been utterly fabricated, giving rise to the explosive growth of “fake news” (before the moniker morphed into a description of any news a reader objects to).

Silicon Valley caught on late to the Washington game. In 2011, Sen. Pat Leahy, D-Vt., then the chairman of the Judiciary Committee, complained that Google had waited too long to hire an armada of lobbyists. “Sometimes a company should pay attention early on, not just when matters happen,” he said. “But I can’t tell them, nor would I, who they should hire or not.”

Google was playing catch up at the time, and hiring every committee staffer who wasn’t nailed down. “I consider myself a public works project right here,” Leahy said of the antitrust investigation he was leading. “My colleagues call it the Leahy Full Employment Act.”

In the face of intense community opposition, immigration officials are vowing to push ahead with plans to deport a 20-year Ann Arbor, Michigan resident.

Immigration and Customs Enforcement has ordered Lourdes Salazar-Bautista, 49, to leave the country by August 2. The local community and elected officials have rallied in support of the mother of three, but ICE spokesperson Khaalid Walls told The Intercept that the agency will not back down.

“In a current exercise of discretion, the agency has allowed her to remain free from custody while timely finalizing her departure plans,” Walls wrote in a statement. “ICE focuses its enforcement resources on individuals who pose a threat to national security, public safety and border security. However, as Secretary Kelly has made clear, ICE will not exempt classes or categories of removable aliens from potential enforcement. All of those in violation of the immigration laws may be subject to immigration arrest, detention and, if found removable by final order, removal from the United States.”

The Mexican native says she’s not done fighting.

“I’m not a threat to this country,” said Salazar-Bautista, choking back her tears during a vigil at St. Mary Student Parish in Ann Arbor on Tuesday evening, broadcast on Facebook live. “I want to have a chance to continue guiding [my children] and educating them so they can reach the future, since I come from a very humble environment, I wasn’t able to reach.”

Salazar-Bautista immigrated to the United States in 1997. An immigration judge ordered her deportation in absentia in 1998. She says she never received the notices from the immigration court regarding her deportation, and she continued to live her life, raising her children and performing odd jobs—cooking, cleaning, and ironing for people in her community — until ICE picked her up in 2010. She was detained for 23 days, she said in the speech in Ann Arbor, and was released on the condition that her husband return to Mexico and that she check in annually with the immigration agency.

Immigration officials have routinely granted Salazar-Bautista a stay of removal since then, she says. But a new president was in office when she checked in with ICE in March, and she became one of many immigrants nationwide targeted for deportation after years of being considered low priorities for removal by the Obama administration.

The president has broad authority over immigration enforcement efforts to remove individuals present in the country without legal status. Citing the Department of Homeland Security’s finite resources, President Barack Obama’s administration set priorities for removals in a 2014 memo. Former DHS Secretary Jeh Johnson laid out a three-part hierarchy, prioritizing the removals of national security threats, serious convicted criminals, and recent border crossers. The administration also listed factors to be considered for the exercise of prosecutorial discretion (a decision not to take action against an otherwise removable person), including strong community ties and length of time in the country.

That meant that immigration officials did not prioritize deporting people like Salazar-Bautista, who had no criminal history, contributed to her community, and had three American children. As such, ICE routinely granted stays of removal, temporary postponements that prevent DHS from executing a deportation.

In one of his first steps toward dismantling Obama’s legacy, President Donald Trump issued a January executive order on “enhancing public safety in the interior of the United States.” That document and a subsequent memo from DHS Secretary John Kelly explaining the directive rescinded all previous policy related to removal priorities. In effect, the White House chose to target a much broader group of unauthorized immigrants for removal and granted individual ICE agents with broad discretion over apprehending individuals suspected of being in violation of immigration law.

In other words, the new DHS enforcement guidelines make anyone present in the U.S. illegally equally fair game for deportation, including those charged, but not yet convicted, of “any criminal offense,” and those like Salazar-Bautista with final orders of removal.

Kelly’s memo “leveled the playing field” in terms of susceptibility to deportation, said Patricia Zapor, communications director at CLINIC, an immigration advocacy group.

“If they keep saying the focus is on the bad guys, the bad hombres, that’s not really the way it’s playing out,” she said. “The people who definitely feel at risk now are those with U.S. citizen kids, with families, with businesses. It’s really changed the level of fear.”

Salazar-Bautista bought one-way tickets to Mexico for herself and her children for August 1, according to Luz Meza, an organizer of the Ann Arbor campaign to support her, called Lucha Por Lourdes. Salazar-Bautista’s lawyer, David Newman, presented the tickets to ICE on Wednesday to show her intent to comply with the order, even as they continue to ask Detroit ICE Director Rebecca Adducci to stay the removal, Meza told The Intercept.

“Please if someone can talk against these authorities to be able to get a change not just for me, for so many people who are in the same situation as I am,” Salazar-Bautista said in a Facebook video recording of the Tuesday vigil, acknowledging that her case is one of many.

The southeast Michigan immigrant community, like many across the country, is feeling the burn of the recent changes in immigration enforcement, Meza said.

“We’ve seen a lot of raids that are separating families and causing emotional harm to children,” she added. “We think in the long run this is going to have a very terrible impact on the kids who will grow up without their parents here.”

The case has become a rallying cry for local activists and elected officials at odds with the Trump administration’s immigration policies.

As of Friday, more than 8,000 people had signed a petition asking the Detroit ICE Field Office to stop the deportation. The Ann Arbor City Council on Monday unanimously passed a resolution asking ICE to stay Salazar-Bautista’s deportation, describing her as a “lawful, positive, contributing resident and tax payer of Ann Arbor for close to twenty years.”

“Lourdes’ threatened deportation is a breach of faith and a disgrace,” said Ann Arbor Mayor Christopher Taylor on Tuesday in a speech delivered at a rally and broadcast on Facebook. “It won’t protect American jobs. All it will do is devastate an already separated family and impoverish a community that values her.”

American leadership “will not endure” if people like Salazar-Bautista are deported, Taylor added in the rally speech. “It is up to us to do everything we can to keep this family together, that we tell the administration that its fearful vision of immigrants and refugees is an affront to our history and our values, and, finally, that it is up to us to do everything we can to tell the world that Trump is not America.”

Michigan delivered its electoral college votes to Trump, as he edged out Clinton by just over 10,000 votes. Clinton, however, annihilated Trump in the liberal enclave of Ann Arbor, outpacing him by nearly 3-1.

Not long before a major crisis ripped through the Middle East, pitting the United States and a bloc of Gulf countries against Qatar, Jared Kushner’s real estate company had unsuccessfully sought a critical half-billion investment from one of the richest and most influential men in the tiny nation, according to three well-placed sources with knowledge of the near transaction.

Kushner is a senior adviser to President Trump, and also his son in law, and also the scion of a New York real estate empire that faces an extreme risk from an investment made by Kushner in the building at 666 Fifth Avenue where the family is now severely underwater.

Qatar is facing an ongoing blockade led by Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates, and joined by Egypt and Bahrain, which President Trump has taken credit for sparking. Kushner, meanwhile, has reportedly played a key behind-the-scenes role in hardening the U.S. posture toward the embattled nation.

That hardline comes in the wake of the previously unreported half-billion deal that was never consummated. Throughout 2015 and 2016, Jared Kushner and his father, Charles, negotiated directly with a major investor in Qatar, Sheikh Hamad bin Jassim al-Thani, known as HBJ for short, in an effort to refinance the property on Fifth Avenue, the sources said.

Trump himself has unsuccessfully sought financing in recent years from the Qataris, but it is difficult to overstate just how important to Kushner the investment at 666 Fifth Avenue is for him, his company, and his family’s legacy in real estate. Without some outside intervention or unforeseen turnaround in the market, the investment could become an embarrassing half billion dollar loss. It’s unclear precisely how much peril such a loss would put Jared, or his family’s, finances in, given the opacity of their private holdings.

HBJ, a former prime minister of Qatar who ran the country’s $250 billion sovereign wealth fund, is a billionaire and one of the world’s richest men. He owns a yacht worth $300 million called Al Mirqab, the same name he gave to the private investment firm that Kushner pitched. The former emir of Qatar summed up HBJ’s power with a quip: “I may run this country, but he owns it.”

HBJ ultimately agreed to invest at least $500 million through Al Mirqab, on the condition that the Kushner Companies could raise the rest of a multi-billion refinancing elsewhere. The negotiations continued long after the election, carried out as recently as this spring by Charles Kushner. “HBJ basically told them, we’re good for 500, subject to a lot of things, but mainly subject to you being able to raise the rest,” said one source in the region with knowledge of the deal. The talks were confirmed by two additional sources with knowledge of the talks. One of those sources claimed that the potential deal was not contingent on the rest of the money being raised and that the HBJ investment was on hold as the overall structure of the financing was reconsidered. None of the sources would agree to talk on the record about a private financial transaction that has until now remained a secret.

After the election, Kushner Companies found many more suitors interested in doing business, one of the sources, who is U.S.-based, said. One of the investors taking the deal more seriously in the end of 2016 and early 2017, the U.S. source said, was “Hamid bin what’s-his-name,” referring to HBJ. Top executives at Kushner Companies, the source said, “are dumb enough to not know that why they want to deal with them has nothing to do with the real estate. Around the New Year they were like, ‘LPs” — industry slang for limited partners, or investors — “are engaging more!’ It’s like, I wonder why?”

Or, perhaps, they know quite well what’s going on. The $500 million still left the Kushners far short, and to try to fill the financing hole, the company turned to China. An insurance firm there with close ties to the country’s ruling elite had been pursued for months, but, like the other investors, wasn’t truly interested in the deal until after the election. (A source familiar with the dealmaking said that the Kushners had been been in discussions with HBJ since before Trump announced his candidacy in June 2015. When a potential deal with Anbang was first reported by the New York Times in January 2017, company spokeswoman Risa Heller said the talks began “well before the president-elect’s victory,” right around when he officially sealed the Republican nomination.)

White House spokeswoman Hope Hicks referred questions to Kushner Companies; a spokesman there declined the Intercept’s request for comment. HBJ declined to comment.

In March, the details of the talks between Kushner and the firm, Anbang, became public. Anbang would invest $400 million in the project and the Kushners would put up $750 million, and additional investors, of which the Intercept’s sources say HBJ was to be one, would contribute a total of almost $2 billion more, according to a document being shown to investors that was shared with Bloomberg. The investment would have fit a trend of increasing Qatari investment in New York city real estate: Qatar’s sovereign wealth fund, which HBJ used to run, has increased its investment in New York city real estate in recent years, and HBJ has a number of property investments in London and New York.

Anbang’s $400 million, plus $100 million from other investors, would flow to the Kushners, meaning the family would recoup the entirety of their initial $500 million investment, a startling turnaround given that the New York Times’ detailed analysis of the building’s woes found the Kushners investment was now essentially worthless.

Crucially, in addition to its cash investment, the deal called for Anbang to take out a $4 billion loan to finance the demolition of the current building and the construction of an 80-story Zaha Hadid-designed residential and retail tower in its place. (The total cost for the project would around $7.5 billion.) Only a handful of companies in the real estate business, such as Blackstone or Brookfield, are big enough to secure that size of loan, and to-date they appear unwilling to take on the level of scrutiny the deal would bring, nevermind offer terms as favorable as Anbang’s. Additionally, any borrower would have to get their loan from somewhere, and one dynamic stymying the deal maybe that any bank that underwrote such a loan would face just as much scrutiny for their financial and political judgement as the investor they gave it to.

Anbang pulled out after the deal was criticized as a conflict of interest, given Kushner’s role in the White House. With Anbang, and its ability to secure a $4 billion construction loan, out, the Qatari condition wasn’t met, and the Gulf deal fizzled, according to a source in the region. That chain of events was disputed by a source who said said the deal between HBJ and the Kushners wasn’t dead, but on hold as the deal’s mix of loans and equity was reconsidered.

The revelation of the half-billion dollar deal raises thorny and unprecedented ethical questions. If the deal is not entirely dead, that means Jared Kushner is on the one hand pushing to use the power of American diplomacy to pummel a small nation while on the other his firm is hoping to extract an extraordinary amount of capital from there for a failing investment. If, however, the deal is entirely dead, the pummeling may be seen as intimidating to other investors on the end of a Kushner Companies pitch.

The crisis dates to May, when President Trump visited Saudi Arabia and met with regional leaders there, laying his hands on the now-famous orb. The Emir of Qatar met with Saudi King Salman, a high-level Qatari sources told The Intercept, and it went well. “ The Emir was in Jeddah before the summit, had a meeting with King Salman. King Salman did not bring up any subject about differences with Qatar,” he said. “After the summit, the Saudis and the Emirates, they thought, after signing all these contracts, they can have the upper hand in the region and they don’t want any country not to be in the same line.”

Whatever the reasoning, on June 5th, a diplomatic crisis broke out, as Saudi Arabia and the UAE downgraded ties with Qatar, citing Qatar’s funding of terrorist organizations. Weeks earlier, the same countries blocked a number Qatari-backed media outlets citing derogatory public comments by the Emir, which Qatar insisted were fabricated and the resutl of a hack.

The blockade continued. At a private fundraiser in late June, he aimed at Qatar again, this time mocking the pronunciation of the country’s name. “We’re having a dispute with Qatar — we’re supposed to say Qatar. It’s Qatar, they prefer. I prefer that they don’t fund terrorism,” he quipped, according to an audio recording of his speech obtained by The Intercept.

The Kushner’s purchase of 666 5th Avenue for a record breaking $1.8 billion in 2007 was capstone to an era marked by high prices and reckless amounts of debt. The Kushners invested $500 million in the building, and took out debt to cover the rest. But even at the height of a bubbling New York real estate market, there were clear signs that the price was too high and the debt was too much. The Kushners paid $1,200 a square foot, twice the previous per square foot record of $600, while records show that even with the building initially almost fully rented out, revenue only covered about two-thirds of family’s debt costs.

When the financial crisis hit, rents when down, vacancies went up and the Kushners were short on cash to pay their debts. They sold off the Fifth Avenue retail space for $525 million and used the proceeds to pay off non-mortgage debt on the building. Then in 2011, the Kushners sold off just under 50 percent of the building’s office space to Vornado, as part of a refinancing deal with the publicly traded real estate giant.

The $1.2 billion interest-only mortgage is due in February 2019. The office space is worth less than its mortgage and “there is no equity value” left in the office section of the building, Jed Reagan of Green Street Advisors told the New York Times in April. (Because they sold the retail space to make payments on other debt tied to the building, the office space is the only part of the tower the Kushners still have a stake in.) As a result, the family’s initial $500 million investment, once-heralded as an example of Jared’s emergence as a brash real estate star, has for now effectively been wiped out. A massive refinancing and construction of a new tower that dramatically increases the building’s value is one way to try get out of that hole.

The Kushners are also looking for loans totalling $250 million to pay off debt it used to build an apartment building in Jersey City, Bloomberg first reported in June. The tower, called Trump Bay Street, was financed in part by Chinese investors. Those investments were made through the E5-B visa program, which gives green cards to wealthy foreigners in exchange for investments in the U.S. The family also owes CIT Group $140 million, which it must repay by September. A company spokesman later confirmed to the New York Times that it was indeed seeking the $250 million loan.

The Kushners came under fire in May when the New York Times reported that Jared’s sister Nicole Meyer had pitched her family’s ties as part of a roadshow to raise money for another Jersey City building under the same pay-for-residency visa program. After the report, the family backtracked and said they would not take part in the roadshow going forward.

Meanwhile, the water is rising on the Fifth Avenue investment. And the blockade continues.

Had the Qataris known where things were heading diplomatically, said the source in the region, they’d have happily ponied up the money, even knowing that it was a losing investment. “It would have been much cheaper,” he said.

Publicly-traded companies don’t typically need to issue statements saying that they do not support terrorism. But Facebook is no ordinary company; its sheer scale means it is credited as a force capable of swaying elections, commerce, and, yes, violent radicalization. In June, the social network published an article outlining its counter-terrorism policy, stating unequivocally that “There’s no place on Facebook for terrorism.” Bad news for foreign plotters and jihadis, maybe, but what about Americans who want violence in America?

In its post, Facebook said it will use a combination of artificial-intelligence-enabled scanning and “human expertise” to “keep terrorist content off Facebook, something we have not talked about publicly before.” The detailed article takes what seems to be a zero-tolerance stance on terrorism-related content:

We remove terrorists and posts that support terrorism whenever we become aware of them. When we receive reports of potential terrorism posts, we review those reports urgently and with scrutiny. And in the rare cases when we uncover evidence of imminent harm, we promptly inform authorities. Although academic research finds that the radicalization of members of groups like ISIS and Al Qaeda primarily occurs offline, we know that the internet does play a role — and we don’t want Facebook to be used for any terrorist activity whatsoever.

Keeping the (to put it mildly) highly-motivated membership of ISIS and Al Qaeda off any site is no small feat; replacing a banned account or deleted post with a new one is a cinch. But if Facebook is serious about refusing violent radicals a seat at the table, it’s only doing half its job, as the site remains a cozy home for domestic — let’s be frank: white — extremists in the United States, whose views and hopes are often no less heinous and gory than those of the Islamic State.

In Facebook’s post, ISIS and Al Qaeda are mentioned by name 11 times, while the word “domestic” doesn’t appear once, nor are U.S.-based terror networks referenced in any other way. That gap in the company’s counter-extremism policy is curious.

In January 2016, a band of armed militants led by Ammon and Ryan Bundy entered and occupied the Malheur National Wildlife Refuge in Harney County, Oregon. Members of the group, with ties to armed, extremist “patriot” groups like the Oath Keepers and Three Percenters, said they wanted to shift federal land to local control, and at one point Ryan Bundy told a reporter the group was willing to kill or die if necessary. It would take little work to draw a clear through line from the movement that spawned Timothy McVeigh to the loose confederation around the Bundy family. One of the radicals posted a “goodbye” video to YouTube, taking as a given that he would be slain by the government during the occupation. Between their assault rifles and their implicitly violent rhetoric, opinion pieces at Newsweek, the Washington Post, and CNN all argued that the occupiers were domestic terrorists.

Ammon and Ryan Bundy had earned extremist cachet prior to the Oregon takeover, when, in 2014, they joined with supporters (many of them armed) and their father Cliven Bundy to chase off agents of the Bureau of Land Management who were trying to confiscate Cliven Bundy’s cattle in connection with delinquent grazing fees. Senator Harry Reid at the time denounced the ideologues as “nothing more than domestic terrorists” who do “not recognize the United States.”

And indeed, many in the “Patriot Movement” also consider themselves “sovereign citizens,” a logically bankrupt (and sometimes violent) strain of anti-government anger in which you simply declares yourself exempt from American laws and, in particular, the payment of taxes. At MSNBC, a former ATF agent described his work with homegrown extremists like those at Malheur:

“We worked them under the classification of domestic terrorism. There is the umbrella federal crime of terrorism, and domestic terrorism is a classification we used against any homegrown group which intends to coerce or intimidate through threats or acts of violence.”

It’s worth noting that Ammon Bundy and five of his followers were, surprisingly, acquitted of federal charges stemming from their occupation of the reserve, while federal charges in connection with the Nevada case remain tied up in court following a mistrial. Still, had the group’s members been born in Pakistan or Syria, Harney County would probably resemble the surface of the moon right now. American radicals like the Bundy clan are cuter about their fantasies of destroying the federal government than, say, ISIS, who of course won’t hesitate to explicitly call for violent attacks using every medium at their disposal. Domestic extremists are sometimes more careful about their words, and rely on insinuations and dog whistles rather than overt threats, and American gun culture makes it easy to camouflage violent speech within political speech. But what is an online call for armed reinforcements and a willingness to shed blood (or die) if confronted by police if not a threat?

Asked whether the company is as committed to combating white extremists as jihadists, a Facebook spokersperson reiterated that the company’s policy was to refuse a presence to any person or group who supports a violent agenda. When asked about specific entities like the Bundy family, the spokesperson replied “I can’t speak to the specific groups you cited, but, again, if a group has engaged in acts of violence, we don’t want to give them a voice on Facebook.” So what’s violence, then? “Does Facebook,” I asked, “consider the armed takeover of a federal building to be an act of violence?” The company’s reply: “I don’t have an answer on that.” Brian Fishman, a co-author of the Facebook company post on terrorism, did not answer a request for comment.

Daryl Johnson is a former Homeland Security analyst who spent years studying domestic threats to the United States. Johnson told The Intercept that although “not all extremists are violent,” treating domestic threats as something distinct from the likes of ISIS for policy purposes “on the surface makes sense, but if you start comparing and contrasting, it doesn’t.” Domestic extremists “are using social media sites as platforms to put forth their extreme ideas and a violent agenda, enabling people to recruit and spread” their ideology—an ideology that Heidi Beirich of the Southern Poverty Law Center said is as dangerous as any threat from the Middle East. “It’s as though terrorism can’t be white,” Beirich told The Intercept after reviewing the Facebook post. “They’re willing to go hardcore against ISIS and Al Qaeda, but where’s the response to white supremacism and its role in domestic terrorism or anti-government crazies?” To Beirich, “What this article is saying is how we counter Islamic terrorism,” not terrorism per se:

My position is this is outrageous. Terrorism from the Dylan Roofs of the world is as much of a problem here in the United States as it is from the Tsarnaev brothers. The bodies stacked on both sides is about the same since 9/11. I don’t understand why they can’t see that. It’s worrying to me because it plays into the narrative as though all terrorism is coming from radical Islam, which is a false narrative. This adds to that, and it takes our eye off the ball in terms of where terrorism comes from..a large chunk of our domestic terrorism is committed by folks with beliefs like those at the Bundy Ranch or Malheur occupation.

Without further comment from Facebook, one can only speculate about why ISIS gets top billing and Bundy supporters do not—but little speculation is needed. A beheading video or pipe bomb instruction image are no-brainers for content moderators, while posts about armed anti-government sedition are perhaps murkier (especially if Facebook is going to let algorithms do the heavy lifting). Labeling right-wing extremism as terrorism would also likely cause a public relations migraine Facebook doesn’t care for, particularly after reports of how it filters out bogus right-wing news sources have already tarnished its image on the right.

All of this is to say that the work ahead of Facebook, if it really does want to be serious about combating terrorism, is extremely difficult, and given the company’s track record, may well be fumbled. Preventing Facebook from being a place where anti-government radicals can comfortably spread an ideology of implicit violence feels reasonable, while blocking discussions about these figures and ideologies — in everything from academic or journalistic contexts to your dad’s News Feed — would not. When does sympathy for an armed radical group become support? When (if ever) does Facebook-cheering a violent group become complicity in the violence? This is deeply complex and horribly fraught, whether you’re looking at Mosul or Montana. Facebook knows this, which is why its article on moderating extremist content is titled “Hard Questions.” Facebook also knows that an overly broad crackdown on foreign terrorism would provoke the tiniest fraction of backlash compared to clamping down on right-wing white America, where love of assault rifle ownership and hatred for government are shared in polite society. But hard questions deserve better than cop outs, which is exactly what ignoring white, domestic terrorism amounts to: a cop out. If the company wants to live up to its commitments here, it will require even harder work, harder thinking, harder scrutiny, and harder debates. Yes, it might require sometimes banning extremists in cowboy hats.

It was just before sunrise, and John was cruising down a near-empty Dallas highway when a speeding car rear-ended him at over 65 miles per hour. His body lunged forward, but in the moment, he didn’t think he was seriously hurt; with his adrenaline pumping, John just felt a bit “shaken up.” A veteran Uber driver, he pulled over to the shoulder, exchanged information with the other driver — who, it later emerged, lacked active insurance — and reassured his passenger they’d be at their destination soon. He even drove a few more rides that day. But John couldn’t rid himself of a nagging headache and lingering pain in his back and neck that grew more intense each hour.

When he woke up the next morning, he sensed there was something seriously wrong. Thus began the endless saga of doctor visits and MRIs that culminated in a major back surgery to repair nerve damage. John is now only able to drive a fraction of the 70-80 hours a week he used to. His neck and back begin to ache after just a few hours on the road.

“I like driving, and still have to provide,” said the father of two children, who still drives for Uber and asked that his real name be withheld over fear of reprisals. Since the accident, he says he’s cut the family grocery budget by at least a fifth to stretch his smaller paycheck as far as possible.

What happened to John is common — driving a car for a living is a risky proposition. Though the federal government doesn’t break out data related to Uber, taxi drivers, who perform very similar work, are more likely to be killed on the job than police officers, and they are are about as likely to miss work due to an injury as workers in other dangerous industries like logging or mining

But unlike many taxi drivers, Uber drivers are not entitled to workers’ compensation benefits. That means when drivers like John are hurt on the job, and unable to go back to work full-time, they won’t receive a portion of their salary during recovery—and they often have to rely on their own health insurance to pay medical bills.

“I didn’t even think about getting workers’ compensation,” John said. “Uber wasn’t paying for anything.” John knew what many drivers know: that Uber fights tooth and nail in courts and in front of labor boards from New York to California to classify its drivers as independent contractors, in part to avoid having to pay for workers’ compensation payouts to its more than 300,000 drivers, a workforce comparable to major employers like Home Depot and Target.

Last month, for the first time since it appeared on the scene in 2009, Uber moved to acknowledge and address the problem. The company has partnered with insurance giants OneBeacon and Aon to pilot a new voluntary program that would provide a way for drivers like John to recoup their wages and cover medical expenses if they are injured on the job. Uber touted the insurance as a “low-cost option” for its drivers “to protect themselves and their families against rare and unforeseen accidents that prevent them from working.” The plan will be available in eight states, and it will be up to drivers to decide if they want to set aside 3.75 cents per-mile to buy the policy. Uber has also raised its rates in those states to offset the cost of buying the policy—though Uber rates tend to fluctuate, and there’s no guarantee that the company will not cut the the price in the future.

The Intercept obtained a copy of an 18-page explanation of coverage provided to drivers in Illinois. The insurance scheme was covered in national publications like Bloomberg, as well as local outlets where the plan rolled out, and described as Uber offering “workers’ compensation” benefits. But the first page of the document exclaims in all capital letters: “THIS INSURANCE IS NOT WORKERS’ COMPENSATION INSURANCE.”

There are two major differences between Uber’s plan and traditional workers’ compensation insurance: the plan is optional, and Uber is asking drivers to pay for it themselves. By law, workers’ compensation insurance for traditional employees is mandatory, and must be paid for by the employer itself. It’s hard to be sure how much money Uber saves by asking drivers to foot the bill—but based on proprietary risk-rates provided to The Intercept to the National Council on Compensation Insurance, it could be thousands of dollars per year per driver.

Compared to traditional workers’ compensation insurance, Uber’s policy represents a major step down in terms of quality, said Michael Gruber, president of the Workers’ Injury Law & Advocacy Group, a non-profit group of attorneys and others focused on occupational claims. For example, in Massachusetts, New York and California, workers’ compensation can pay out two-thirds of salary when a worker is too injured to return to work — while the Uber policy maxes out at half of a driver’s average weekly earnings. Uber’s policy also appears to allow the insurer to deny coverage at their own doctors discretion. Another key feature of traditional workers’ compensation is that an appointed State Board adjudicates disputes that may arise. Those boards are often comprised of both labor and business representatives. Uber’s policy appears to require drivers to submit to a binding arbitration proceeding, explicitly renounce their right to appear before a workers’ comp board, and give up their right to sue or join a class-action lawsuit.

Uber didn’t directly dispute that characterization. “Driver injury protection provides people who drive with Uber a low-cost option to protect themselves and their families against unforeseen accidents that prevent them from working,” said an Uber spokesperson who asked to remain anonymous. “The product is specifically tailored to fit the flexible nature of ridesharing and provides access to coverage that was previously cost prohibitive or administratively difficult for drivers to access on their own.”

The insurance policy is not without precedent. In many ways, it resembles the types of disability benefits long-haul truckers purchase to make sure they are covered when they cross state lines into different workers’ compensation jurisdictions, said Robert Grey, an attorney and workers’ compensation expert in New York. Since workers’ compensation varies state-by-state, a portable insurance plan may make sense for drivers who find themselves crisscrossing the country.

But Uber drivers typically work within one state. Grey worries that the Uber plan is a scheme to save the company money while providing the illusion of coverage. Drivers won’t push for more comprehensive workers’ compensation benefits, Grey said, if they think Uber is looking out for them. “It’s about creating a situation that feels comfortable enough that drivers don’t worry about the larger scope of benefits they are losing,” he said. Indeed, the description of benefits document from Illinoise actually requires the driver to identify as a contractor in order to access coverage.

In nearly every city and state Uber has entered, there’s been a battle over whether drivers are independent contractors or traditional employees Although the Obama administration largely stayed out of the debate, its Department of Labor did issue a series of non-binding guidelines urging so-called “platform” companies to avoid misclassifying their workforce. The Trump administration withdrew those guidelines earlier this month.

The company also has been forced to fend off high-profile suits in California and New York that would force it to treat drivers like employees. In a separate batch of lawsuits, ironically, Uber has argued that its text messages to potential drivers shouldn’t be covered by anti-spamming laws because they are technically offers of employment, and therefore exempt from regulation.

Ultimately, Uber’s business model depends on fighting off attempts to classify its workers as employees, which would make them eligible for benefits and subject to labor regulations. And workers’ compensation is often frontlines of that battle. “The first commandment in the Bible Of Uber is: Thou Shalt Not Be an Employee,” said Grey. “workers’ compensation is often a prime factor there.”

In some instances, Uber has prefered to pull up stakes before paying out workers’ compensation. In 2015, shortly after Uber launched operations in Alaska, Rhonda Gerharz, the chief investigator for Alaska’s Workers’ Compensation Board, initiated an investigation into the company. She thought that the company was possibly misclassifying its drivers as independent contractors, allowing it to avoid buying expensive workers’ compensation insurance in violation of Alaska law.

“Misclassification is a big deal,” she explained. “If these workers get hurt and the company doesn’t have insurance, the public ends up picking up the bill in the form of benefits like food stamps and low-income housing assistance.”

She began to dig into the exact relationship between drivers and the company. “I look at things like: does the business have the right to hire or fire someone, who’s exercising control of the manner of means to accomplish the task, and who provides the tools for the job,” she told The Intercept.

At first blush, Uber appeared to Gerharz to be operating like a traditional employer, and therefore skirting workers’ compensation laws. But before she could finish her investigation, Uber pulled out of the state entirely. Uber did not respond to request for comment about its operations in Alaska. But over the past two years, Uber worked to convince Alaska legislators to write a carve-out to exempt transportation companies that do business with an app from workers’ compensation regulation. Alaska Governor Bill Walker signed the bill into law earlier this month.

Gerharz is frustrated that Uber found a way to circumvent her agency’s regulation. “They are powerful because they are a financial giant,” she said. “Those guys are bullies.” As for the workers’ compensation plan that Uber is piloting to drivers, Gerharz says it just doesn’t pass muster: “Here in Alaska you can’t charge employees for workers’ compensation premiums, that’s a misdemeanor in our state,” she said.

In other parts of the country, Uber drivers can get workers’ compensation coverage. But the company never foots the bill. In New York, for example, Uber is required by state law to consider its drivers “Black Car Drivers,” who are not employees, but are still eligible for a form of workers’ compensation that’s funded by a city-wide surcharge on rides. Last month, under pressure from a driver lawsuit, Uber admitted that it had been improperly pocketing a portion of that surcharge, as well as a local sales tax, for years — underpaying drivers by tens of millions of dollars.

The new Uber pilot policy falls short of the Black Car Fund’s standard of coverage. It fails to include the most common type of workers’ compensation claim: “permanent partial disability,” a situation resembling John’s, where a worker is hurt on the job, making it hard for them to work full-time. The document reviewed by The Intercept, from the Illinois pilot, only appears to covers disabilities that completely prevent a driver from working. Bryant Greening, an attorney in Chicago who specializes in ride-sharing cases, said Uber drivers reach out to him multiple times a week, reporting an injury on the job — but few of them are completely disabled. “It’s an ultra-hazardous job,” he said. “Nobody thinks they’re going to get hurt — until they do.”

Another apparent major gap in the policy: mental health and trauma, said Gruber. Uber’s policy contains provisions preemptively denying permanent disability coverage for “Mental and Nervous or Depressive” conditions. That’s despite the fact that Uber drivers — especially women — have been exposed to sexual harassment and assault on the job.

San Diego driver Becky Graham had to stop working for six weeks in 2015 after she said two of her Uber passengers pinned her down and sexually assaulted her. “I panicked every time I turned on the app, it was just so traumatizing for me,” she told The Intercept. After working with a psychiatrist, she was able to return to driving—a job she enjoyed despite the haunting memory of her assault. Although driving for Uber was her main source of income, she was not able to recoup any lost wages during the time she sought treatment for her trauma, even after her case was profiled by the Guardian as part of a longer investigation into Uber’s policy to not turn over a driver or rider’s “basic information” to police without a subpoena. Now, Graham said she is driving less than half of the hours she used to. The work is so much more emotionally taxing. “I panic a little every time I pick someone up,” she says. Under Uber’s new policy, it’s unclear if Graham would not be eligible for any benefits — and Uber would not clarify how its policy would apply in her case.

Graham’s no stranger to workplace trauma. Back in 2001, she worked as a manager at a Carl’s Junior restaurant that she said was violently robbed at gunpoint. The company paid for her and her staff to take the rest of the week off, she said, and provided counseling to help her team process the incident. She can no longer work in the restaurant industry, she says, because she developed intense pain in her feet from standing over long stretches—but she’s nostalgic for her time as a genuine legal employee. “I wished I worked for a company that had my back,” she said. “At Uber, we aren’t considered employees, what can I do?”

These yawning gaps in insurance are nothing new for Uber drivers. The company’s $1 million commercial insurance policy to cover accidents, for example, does not apply when drivers are on the clock but have yet to be hailed for a ride. That’s akin to a fast food restaurant only fully covering its employees when they are making a sandwich or working the register — not when they are waiting in the store — said Bhairavi Desai, the head of the New York City Taxi Workers alliance, an advocacy group the represents thousands of Uber drivers and is often critical of the company. “Everything Uber, does they lower the standards for workers,” she told The Intercept.

Uber has not provided any data on how many drivers have opted to buy its new policy. Devon, an Uber driver in Chicago who didn’t want his full name being used to criticize the company, scoffed at the insurance scheme. “It’s probably as worthless as every other program they roll out for us,” he said, citing a litany of Uber-sponsored offers to help drivers with tax prep, health insurance, and car leases. Asked what precautions he took in case he was injured an unable to work, he replied: “I pray.”

Not everyone feels that way. His friend and fellow driver Dennis is seriously considering buying the policy. “I always worry about getting hurt,” he said. Dennis is concerned, however, that the fee increase that Uber is imposing to offset the cost of the policy for drivers will evaporate if Uber lowers its prices, leaving him with less take-home pay.

In late May, Dennis, Devon, and a few dozen other Uber drivers attended the funeral of a fellow Chicago-area Uber driver Grant Nelson, who was stabbed to death while working. Neither man knew Nelson, but they felt a certain kinship with him. “Most of us [drivers] never met him,” says Devon. “This hit really close to home for us.”

Uber’s pilot insurance policy does include a survivor’s benefit for families of drivers killed on the job. And Nelson’s murder, Dennis says, is motivating many of his fellow drivers to consider buying the policy. Uber did not respond to request for comment about whether Nelson’s family would receive a death benefit—the insurance plan launched in Chicago just a few days before he was stabbed.

Although he’s critical of Uber’s pilot program Gruber, the President of Workers’ Injury Law & Advocacy Group, is happy that, at long last, Uber drivers will have access to some coverage: “If this is the only option, better something than nothing,” he says.

John, the injured driver from Texas, disagrees. Uber is not piloting the program in his state, and he wouldn’t buy the policy even if it were available to him. “With all that money they are paying me?” he said sarcastically. “No thanks, Uber.”

In 2009, the noted Republican strategist Frank Luntz wrote a memo to GOP members of Congress, advising them on how to resist the Democrats’ healthcare reform bill that would go on to become Obamacare. “Stop talking economic theory,” he said, use “words that work,” and offer a viable conservative alternative. “It’s not enough to just say what you’re against,” instructed Luntz. “You have to tell them what you’re for.”

How did we get to this point? A point where Harvard researchers are warning of 217,000 additional deaths over the next decade from a loss of health coverage? Part of the blame has to lie with the Democrats, who failed to heed Luntz’s advice to the Republicans.

First, in defending Obamacare, they lacked “words that work.” For instance, how many people know, understand or even care what an “individual mandate” is? How about insurance “exchanges”? Or the “public option”? These technical terms and phrases have obscured more than they have clarified. They have also played into the hands of the Republicans, who have worked hard to ensure that the public view healthcare only through a partisan lens.

Remember: around one in three Americans is unaware of the fact that there is no difference between Obamacare and the Affordable Care Act (ACA) — they are one and the same. Many of these people tell pollsters that they like the ACA but dislike Obamacare. (Isn’t it odd how so many Americans’ view of a healthcare system changes when you put the foreign-sounding name of a black man in front of it?)

Second, Democrats have turned down opportunity after opportunity to offer a comprehensive healthcare alternative that guarantees coverage to all Americans (unlike Obamacare, which leaves around 27 million Americans uninsured.) During the Democratic primaries, Hillary Clinton said a single-payer “healthcare for all” system would “never, ever come to pass.” Inspiring, huh?

As for those on the left like Bernie Sanders and — belatedly — Elizabeth Warren, who are keen to offer a progressive alternative to both Trumpcare and Obamacare in the form of guaranteed, government-funded healthcare for all, they may have a clear and inspiring policy alternative but whether they have a clear and inspiring message for it remains to be seen. For example, according to a February 2016 poll by the Kaiser Family Foundation, “nearly two thirds (64%) of Americans say they have a positive reaction to the term ‘Medicare-for-all,’ and most (57%) say the same about ‘guaranteed universal health coverage.’ Fewer have a positive reaction to ‘single payer health insurance system’ (44%) or ‘socialized medicine’ (38%).”

The words don’t work and, as a result, ignorance abounds.

“About half (53%) of Democrats say they have a very positive reaction to ‘Medicare-for-all’ compared with 21 percent who say the same for ‘single payer health insurance system,’” according to the Kaiser poll. But to be clear: “Medicare-for-all” and “single payer” refer to… the same exact thing.

So then “Medicare-for-all” must be the way to go, right? Rather than the bureaucratic-sounding and yawn-inducing “single payer”? Perhaps. Invoking Medicare to make the case for a system in which the government covers the cost of all healthcare claims, however, may not be the silver bullet that some on the left seem to think it is. Not everyone associates Medicare with the government. Remember the anti-Obamacare town halls in the summer of 2009, where attendees carried placards that read “Keep government out of my Medicare”? An August 2009 poll found that 39% of Americans said they wanted government to “stay out of Medicare” — which is, of course, impossible.

Why don’t progressives go with the simpler option of calling their single-payer proposal “universal healthcare”? Or “healthcare for all”? In San Francisco, a single payer system called “Healthy San Francisco” was launched a decade ago and has had very high approval ratings. How about Sanders, Warren et al push for a federal version called “Healthy America”?

Names and phrases matter. Why should conservatives have all the best tunes? As a Briton living in the United States, I can’t help but miss the UK’s National Health Service, the NHS, which is more popular with the British public than both the Royal Family and the armed forces.

Why? Not only because “international comparisons show that the NHS outperforms other countries, including the U.S., in terms of quality of care, efficiency, access and equity,” to quote health economist Andrew Street. It has always been clear what the NHS is and what it stands for. There is no need for “individual mandates”; no concept of “pre-existing conditions.” The NHS was founded, the legendary Labour health secretary and proud socialist Aneurin Bevan explained in 1948, on three core principles: that it “meet the needs of everyone,” that it “be free at the point of delivery,” and that it be based on “need, not ability to pay.”

UK governments of both right and left have signed up to these core principles. Almost 70 years after Bevan’s launch of the health service, it was Conservative Prime Minister David Cameron who, referring to the “magic” of the NHS, said: “You don’t have to produce your wallet or your credit card, you get great treatment because it’s a birthright of being British that we have a National Health Service that is free at the point of use and available to all who need it.”

Can you imagine a leading Republican describing free healthcare as a “birthright” for Americans? Where is the pressure on them to do so? Democrats should take a leaf out of Britain’s book. The NHS is a third rail of British politics because it is based on simple and popular principles. Complexity is the enemy of progress.

“Nobody knew” is typical Trumpian bluster and ignorance. But, to take a step back: why is healthcare such an “unbelievable complex subject”? If the rest of the industrialized countries can guarantee healthcare to all their citizens, why can’t the United States? If the rest of the West treats healthcare as a right, not a privilege, why doesn’t the United States? If countries such as the United Kingdom and Canada can offer a viable and popular model of free healthcare for all, why shouldn’t the United States?

These are the very simple and direct questions that Democrats should be asking of their Republican opponents — and of the American people.

]]>http://uproxx.com/news/memo-democrats-universal-healthcare/feed/5healthcare-feat-uproxx.jpguproxxinterceptA Texas Couple Has Been Exonerated 25 Years After Being Convicted Of Lurid Crimes That Never Happenedhttp://uproxx.com/news/texas-couple-exonerated-satanic-panic/
http://uproxx.com/news/texas-couple-exonerated-satanic-panic/#commentsWed, 21 Jun 2017 17:36:34 +0000http://uproxx.com/?p=400634115

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Twenty-five years after they were convicted of a crime that never happened, Fran and Dan Keller were formally exonerated on June 20 in Austin, Texas.

The couple’s prosecution in 1992 was part of a wave of cases across the country amid an episode of mass hysteria known as the Satanic Panic, when accusations flew that the childcare industry had been infiltrated by bands of Satanists hell-bent on brainwashing and sexually abusing young children. The Kellers’ exoneration brings to a close decades of profound injustice for a couple that paid an exceptionally high price for the credulousness of local law enforcement.

“I still can’t believe it’s happening,” Fran, now 67, said on Tuesday morning while driving with her husband to sign the legal paperwork. She’s still wary; they’ve been waiting for this day for so long she isn’t yet sure it is real. “I guess I’m just tired of having to hang on for so long.”

Dan, 75, is slightly more upbeat — he always thought this day would come. He recalled a sleepless night in prison in 1995 when he said he heard God. “He said, ‘You’re going home, but I have some things to sort through first.’” Dan said he slept soundly that night. “We have to try to not have doubt in our life.”

The exoneration is the first for the nascent conviction integrity unit of the Travis County District Attorney’s Office under the new DA, Margaret Moore. Court documents filed Tuesday announced that there is “no credible evidence” against the Kellers. Moore said she personally reviewed the case and believes exoneration “to be a just outcome.”

Fran and Dan Keller were each sentenced to 48 years in prison for the alleged sexual assault of a 3-year-old girl who was an occasional drop-in at their home daycare center on the rural outskirts of Austin. The child initially accused Dan of spanking her “like daddy” used to, but under intense and repeated questioning by her mother and a therapist, the story morphed to include claims of rape and orgies involving children. From there, the number of children alleging abuse increased and the accusations grew even more lurid and confounding: The Kellers had sacrificed babies; they held ceremonies in a local graveyard; they put blood in the children’s Kool-Aid; Fran cut off the arm of a gorilla in a local park; they flew the children to Mexico to be sexually assaulted by military officials.

When I began reinvestigating the case in 2008 for the Austin Chronicle, I was stunned to learn that police and prosecutors who had worked the case back in the early ’90s still believed some of the most outrageous allegations leveled against the Kellers. The Austin Police Department refused to release its investigative report on the case, forcing the Chronicle to take the agency to court. We ultimately won the right to full, unredacted access.

After reading the report, it was not hard to understand why the department had fought to keep it secret. It was an ALL-CAPS, run-on-sentence fever dream full of breathless accusations and absent any actual investigation that could prove or disprove the claims. On multiple occasions, the lead investigator took the girl who accused the Kellers to lunch at McDonald’s before setting out for drives in the neighborhood where she would point out locations: Yes, she had been abused there; yes, she recognized the cemetery where the Kellers had killed and buried babies; yes, many of the residents of the quiet neighborhood were in on the hi-jinx. Not once did investigators question the child’s statements.

My reinvestigation of the Keller case turned up evidence that would ultimately lead to their release from prison. The only vaguely physical evidence that tied the couple to any wrongdoing was the testimony of a young emergency room doctor named Michael Mouw, who had examined the girl and concluded there was damage to her vaginal area that could be the result of sexual abuse. As it turned out, the doctor was wrong. Mouw told me that not long after the Kellers were convicted, he attended a medical conference where he learned that what he had interpreted as signs of abuse were nothing more than a normal variant of female genitalia.

Mouw’s medical opinion had fundamentally changed, offering the Kellers an avenue to challenge their conviction. During a hearing in the summer of 2013, he unequivocally stated that there was no doubt that the child’s genitalia was normal and that he’d gotten it wrong when he examined her in 1991. He said that he tried to reach out to the Austin Police Department after he realized his error but was rebuffed by the detective, who was “convinced they were guilty.”

After the 2013 hearing, DA Rosemary Lehmberg — who had been head of the office’s child abuse unit at the time of the Kellers’ prosecution — ultimately agreed that the couple had not received a fair trial, and they were released shortly before Christmas that year. While there was no doubt the couple would not be retried, over the intervening years, Lehmberg declined to take the final step and exonerate them, claiming to my former editor that she could not “find a pathway to innocence” for the Kellers. She was essentially trying to prove a negative — seeking evidence that would prove a crime never happened.

Without a formal exoneration, the Kellers struggled to rebuild their lives. They were still saddled with a conviction for sexual assault of a child, which made it nearly impossible to find work or a place to live. Without an income, they had to scrape by with the help of family and food stamps, and they have not been able to get the kind of medical attention they need for health issues prompted in part by abuses they suffered in prison.

The court filing Tuesday should pave the way for the Kellers to collect roughly $1.7 million in state compensation for the 21 years they spent behind bars.

Still, the outcome should not be considered a victory for the criminal justice system. With a few notable exceptions, the law enforcement officials in Austin — police and prosecutors, as well as the state’s Court of Criminal Appeals — failed the residents of the city and more importantly the Kellers by accepting the shocking allegations on their face and abdicating their duty to seek the truth of the matter.

If it weren’t for the dogged support of people like Mouw and attorney Keith Hampton — who has spent more than six years toiling on the case for free in an effort to bring about this exoneration — the Kellers would still be in prison, and that is where they would have died.

Contrary to what many people might think, there is no right not to be convicted of a crime you did not commit. For the most part, the Constitution is silent on this point. Instead, the focus is on whether a person received a fair trial. Did you have at least minimally competent lawyers? Were you afforded the ability to cross-examine witnesses against you? If so, then your conviction — even for a crime that never happened — should stand. Once a person is convicted, the system works only to reinforce that outcome. That remains the reality for untold thousands who sit innocent behind bars today.

“I’m very happy for them, and this is huge for the ultimate resolution of this case,” Hampton said of the Kellers. “We can’t give them their 21 years back, but we are doing everything else we can to restore them. When we finally do that, then they’ll be in a position to forgive us for what we as a society did to them.”